Researchers are presenting findings at the Frontiers in Optics 2012 meeting that observation need not disturb systems as much as once thought, severing the act of measurement from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Scientists who study the ultra-small world of atoms know it is impossible to make certain simultaneous measurements -- for example, finding out both the location and momentum of an electron -- with an arbitrarily high level of precision. Because measurements disturb the system, increased certainty in the first measurement leads to increased uncertainty in the second. The mathematics of this unintuitive concept -- a hallmark of quantum mechanics -- were first formulated by the famous physicist Werner Heisenberg at the beginning of the 20th century and became known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Heisenberg and other scientists later generalized the equations to capture an intrinsic uncertainty in the properties of quantum systems, regardless of measurements, but the uncertainty principle is sometimes still loosely applied to Heisenberg's original measurement-disturbance relationship. Now researchers from the University of Toronto have gathered the most direct experimental evidence that Heisenberg's original formulation is wrong.
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