Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

Question

I know the classic definition, but can somebody give me a real-life application of the principle. Thanx!

Answer 1

No examples on our scale can be seen but heress what it would be like if it where on our scale.

Imagine you are walking and about to go throught a door. Once you enter within the frame of that door your postiion will be known with high certainty to exist in that small 3 foot space of the door frame. Since your postiion is known, your velocity and direction out of the door will be all over the place. You will not simple step out of the door frame and into the next room. You may end up on the far left corner of the the room, on the far right, three feet in front, or 15 feet away from the door. In fact if you went in and out of the door constantly a pattern would emerge....it would be that of wave. Meaing your body as you know it would behave just like a giant wave with starting point at the door frame.

Also if it were at our scale, meaing planck's constant were huge. If you can measure your time accurately, just pull out a stop watch and measure one second you can have a very large amount of energy spontaneouly appear and then dissapper. Meaing if you can measure a second pass by, you can have a space shuttle appear infront of you and then dissappear into thin air. Yeah...in any event the quantum scale is quite strange...luckily planck's contant is teeny tiny.

hope that helped

Answer 2

IT is only for very small charged particles like electrons... for finding out the position or energy of an electron we have to use an electron microscope and it sends electrons to the target to get the information.. but when these elctrons are sent, they change the values of position and momentum of the electron whose information we wanted. Thus the information can never be accurate, there will always be some uncertainity.

(delta x). (delta p) >= h / 4 pi
...........
where delta x is variation in position, delta p is variation in momentum, h is planck constant.

Answer 3

If by 'real life', you mean observable, I don't think there are any.

But theoretically, you'd apply this principle to explain the atomic structure, in terms of portraying the positions of electrons as probability clouds.