Primordial Oscillation — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

01 / 05

TEE-SCI-CN-HEI-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

Primordial Oscillation Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Heisenberg worked out in 1927, at twenty-five, that measuring a particle's position spoils what you know about its speed. It is not a limit of the instrument: it is a property of the world, and no way around it has been found since.

A Author

Werner Heisenberg

B Subject

Quantum Physics

C Aesthetic

Photocopy · Collage

Exploration

The 1927 principle says something narrow and exact: there are pairs of magnitudes —position and momentum, energy and time— that cannot both be defined to arbitrary precision. It is not that the apparatus gets in the way. It is that the question about both at once has no answer.

Almost everything done with that sentence outside physics consists of stretching it until it means nothing: observing alters the observed, it all depends on your point of view, there is no such thing as objectivity.

The honest version is less comfortable and more useful. It does not say there are no facts. It says there are questions whose joint formulation is badly built, and that insisting on them produces noise rather than ignorance.

Details