Quotes & Sayings About Uncertainty Principle

The Principle of Uncertainty fixed once for all the realisation that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty. — Jacob Bronowski

If you are committed, you can select your thoughts and thereby shape your life here on earth into something spectacular. The alternative is to give up this freedom and live a life of mediocrity dominated by uncertainty and suspense. — Tommy Newberry

Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can't do both at the same time. — Kathryn Schulz

When he thought I was ready, my father inducted me into the quantum universe. It seemed to contradict all the science I had learned so far: nothing was really held in place. The essential stuff of the universe was nonmatter, pulses of energy and information, flickering in and out of existence. Everything was up for grabs. A table, a chair was a fluid arrangement of probabilities. Sometimes I expected the uncertainty principle to kick in and find strangers masquerading as my parents, or that our house had been razed by some great atomic upheaval. It was about this time I started sleeping with the light on. MANY — Dominic Smith

Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it. — Ben Yagoda

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.) — Michio Kaku

Do you know of the uncertainty principle, Marjorie?" "I am educated," she snorted, very much annoyed with him. "Then you know that with very small things, we cannot both know where they are and what they are doing. The act of observing them always changes what they are doing. Perhaps God does not look at us individually because to do so would interrupt our work, interfere with our free will ... . — Sheri S. Tepper

The uncertainty principle "protects" quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible. — Richard Feynman

Spinoza's Conjecture:Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.
The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly. Thus it is that we should reward skepticism and disbelief, and champion those willing to change their mind in the teeth of new evidence. Instead, most social institutions-most notably those in religion, politics, and economics-reward belief in the doctrines of the faith or party or ideology, punish those who challenge the authority of the leaders, and discourage uncertainty and especially skepticism. — Michael Shermer

He took his hands off the oars and pulled in the mooring rope. If I make a couple of loops, he thought, I can strap the axe on to my back.
He had a mental picture of what could happen to a man who plunged into the cauldron below a waterfall with a sharp piece of metal attached to his body.
GOOD MORNING.
Vimes blinked. A tall dark robed figure was now sitting in the boat.
'Are you Death?'
IT'S THE SCYTHE, ISN'T IT? PEOPLE ALWAYS NOTICE THE SCYTHE.
'I'm going to die?'
POSSIBLY.
'Possibly? You turn up when people are possibly going to die?'
OH, YES. IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING. IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.
'What's that?'
I'M NOT SURE.
'That's very helpful. — Terry Pratchett

Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an "order" from which the element of spontaneity has been "screened out." But this order is maya, and the "true suchness" of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles - except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of of the universe break down. and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a "principle of uncertainty. — Alan W. Watts

Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. — Edward Witten

The Uncertainty Principle states that you can know where a particle is, or you can know where it's going, but you can't know both at the same time. The same, it turns out, is true of people. And when you try, when you look too closely, you get the Observer Effect. By trying to work out what's going on, you're interfering with destiny. A particle can be in two places at once. A particle can interfere with its own past. It can have multiple futures, and multiple pasts. The universe is complicated. — Harriet Reuter Hapgood

In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle. — Stephen Hawking

The uncertainty principle establishes that regardless of what equipment you use or what techniques you employ, if you increase the resolution of your measurement of one property, there is an unavoidable cost: you necessarily reduce how accurately you can measure a complementary property. As a prime example, the uncertainty principle shows that the more accurately you measure an object's position, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa. — Brian Greene

One may say that predictions are dangerous particularly for the future. If the danger involved in a prediction is not incurred, no consequence follows and the uncertainty principle is not violated. — Edward Teller

If we can somehow control the probability of certain improbable events, then anything, including faster-than-light travel, and even time travel, is possible. Reaching the distant stars in seconds is highly unlikely, but when one can control quantum probabilities at will, then even the impossible may become commonplace. — Michio Kaku

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which boils down in popular discourse to saying that the very act of observing things changes the things you observe, works just as well, worryingly, when you look in the mirror. — N. T. Wright

The uncertainty principle tells us that it would take infinitely long to measure energy (or mass) with infinite precision, and that the longer a particle lasts, the more accurate our measurement of its energy can be. But if the particle is short-lived and its energy cannot possibly be determined with infinite precision, the energy can temporarily deviate from that of a true long-lived particle. In fact, because of the uncertainty principle, particles will do whatever they can get away with for as long as they can. — Lisa Randall

Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely. — Werner Heisenberg

Okay, Polly," her grandfather said. "Let's have some normal, ordinary lesson time. What is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? — Madeleine L'Engle

Yet, the principle of uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of tolerance. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge, all information, between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance, and that's whether it's in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of though that aspires to dogma. — Jacob Bronowski

Second, we resist love because it jams the rational mindset. The mortal mind cannot understand how miracles work, and for our entire lives we are taught to mistrust what cannot be rationally explained. Yet the fact that we cannot understand how miracles work does not mean that miracles don't happen. And while Western science argued for ages that the state of our inner being has little effect on the state of our world, even science today argues otherwise. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle reveals that as our perception of an object changes, the object itself will change. — Marianne Williamson

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic. We certainly cannot predict future events exactly if we cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being who, unlike us, could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals. It seems better to employ the principle of economy known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed. — Stephen Hawking

Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each. — Alan Lightman

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it. — Stephen Hawking

The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone. — Werner Heisenberg

Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it
-Barrow's Uncertainty Principle — John D. Barrow

Indeed, the uncertainty principle ensures that in the nature of things physics is unable to do more than make statistical predictions. — Neil Postman

You never know until you look, said Nanny Ogg, expounding her own Uncertainty Principle. — Terry Pratchett

Over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important. — Stephen Hawking