What is a "heisenberg compensator"???

Question

osme guy in my physics class keeps mentioning this like its some joke that everyone knows

Answer 1

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you can never know where an electron is at any given moment - only the probability of its position. The "Heisenberg compensator" is a fictitious device - created for Star Trek, of all things - that supposedly negates and compensates for this uncertainty, allowing people to use the equally fictitious transporter. Trek engendered lots of pseudo-science like that; some of it led to real science, but your classmate just sounds like a Trekkie to me.

Answer 2

Heisenberg Compensator

Answer 3

Heisenberg compensators are a common joke among physics types, because they are typical of the Star Trek technobable which pretty much just comes up with a "stabalizer" or "compensator" or "generator" to get around all those pesky scientific reasons why the show won't work. For instance "inertial dampers" they are what keep the crew from becoming a pile of goo quished against the view screen on the bridge when they slow down from "full impulse speed" to a dead stop within a few seconds. They "dampen the inertial forces exerted on objects within the field." How? Nobody knows....

As for Heisenburg compensators specifically... I was going to spend some time writing an answer to your question, but then I realized that the great Wikipedia had already done so.
The appropriate article follows...

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In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Heisenberg compensators are part of the transporter system.

A Star Trek matter transporter is presumed to operate by reading the precise quantum state of every particle making up the person to be transported, breaking down that person from their component matter into energy, "beaming" that energy to the desired location, and recombining this energy back into their component matter according to the information gleaned when the precise quantum state was read. However, in quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states (in general terms) that one cannot know the quantum state of a subatomic particle to arbitrary precision. Therefore, matter transportation in this way was believed to be impossible, and this was formalized as the no teleportation theorem.

Thus, the creators of Star Trek created a plot device, the so-called Heisenberg compensators. It is unclear how exactly the Heisenberg compensators work. It is, of course, possible that they do not actually tell you the precise statistics of each particle; they could just compensate for not being able to know them.

When asked "How do the Heisenberg compensators work?" by Time magazine on 28th November 1994, Michael Okuda, technical advisor on Star Trek, famously responded, "They work just fine, thank you."[1]

In a twist of irony, in 1993 it was shown that quantum teleportation, the transferring of the exact quantum state from one object to another, is in fact possible, at the cost of destroying the quantum state of the original object. This, in fact, arguably replicates the behavior of transporters and replicators on the show, where you can get perfect transport or imperfect replication, but not both.
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Wow that would have taken me a long time to type out.

Answer 4

Probably fiction. Werner Heisenberg is the author of the principle bearing his name, which says that on an atomic scale, the position and momentum of a particle cannot be known exactly; the product of the uncertainty of each cannot be less than a small constant (Planck's constant). It sounds as if they are supposing a scheme to make certain something that is not.

Answer 5

Yes, a piece of Trek technology.

Say you've never needed it as you inherited one of Maxwell's demons, and you'll see how much physics he knows.