Uncertainty of Heisenberg - the door to the microcosm

When the young Max Planck told his teacher that he wanted to continue studying theoretical physics, he smiled and assured him that there was nothing to do with the scientist, only "to clean up the roughness". Alas! Through the efforts of Planck, Niels Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, and others, everything is turned upside down, and so thoroughly that you will not return back, and ahead of the road. Further - more: among the general theoretical chaos there suddenly appears, for example, the uncertainty of Heisenberg. As they say, we just did not have enough. At the turn of the 19-20 centuries, scientists opened the door to an unknown area of elementary particles, and there Newton's familiar mechanics failed.

It would seem, "before", all is well - this is the physical body, here is its coordinates. In "normal physics" you can always take an arrow and accurately "poke" it into a "normal" object, even moving. Missing, theoretically, is excluded - Newton's laws are not mistaken. But here the object of research becomes ever smaller - a grain, a molecule, an atom. First, the exact contours of the object disappear, then in its description, probabilistic estimates of the average speeds for gas molecules appear, and finally, the molecular coordinates become "average", and the gas molecule can be said to be either here or there, but most likely , Somewhere in this area. Time will pass and the problem will be solved by Heisenberg's uncertainty, but this later, and now ... Try to get a "theoretical arrow" into the object if it is "in the region of the most probable coordinates." Is it weak? And what is this object, what are its dimensions, forms? There were more questions than answers.

But what about the atom? The well-known planetary model was proposed in 1911 and immediately caused a lot of questions. The main one is: how is the negative electron kept in orbit and why does it not fall on the positive core? As they say right now, that's a good question. It should be noted that all theoretical calculations at this time were carried out on the basis of classical mechanics - the uncertainty of Heisenberg has not yet taken an honorable place in the theory of the atom. It was this fact that did not allow scientists to understand the essence of the mechanics of the atom. "Savior" atom Niels Bohr - he gave him stability by his assumption that the electron has orbital levels, being on which it does not emit energy, i.e. Do not lose it and do not fall on the core.

The study of the continuity of the energy states of the atom has already given impetus to the development of a completely new physics - the quantum physics, the beginning of which Max Planck laid back in 1900. He discovered the phenomenon of energy quantization, and Niels Bohr found its application. However, in the future it turned out that it would be completely wrong to describe the model of an atom by the classical mechanics of a macro-world that is understandable to us. Even time and space under the conditions of the quantum world acquire a completely different meaning. By this time the attempts of theoretical physicists to give a mathematical model of the planetary atom ended in many-storied and ineffectual equations. The problem was solved using the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. This surprisingly modest mathematical expression connects the uncertainties of the spatial coordinate Δx and the velocity Δv with the mass of the particle m and the Planck constant h :.

Δx * Δv> h / m

Hence the fundamental difference between micro- and macrocosm: the coordinates and velocities of particles in the microworld are not defined in a specific form-they have a probabilistic character. On the other hand, the Heisenberg principle on the right-hand side of the inequality contains a completely concrete positive value, which implies that the zero value of at least one of the uncertainties is eliminated. In practice, this means that the speed and position of particles in the subatomic world is always determined with inaccuracy, and it is never zero. In exactly the same foreshortening, Heisenberg uncertainty connects other pairs of linked characteristics, for example, the energy uncertainty ΔE and the time Δt:

ΔЕΔt> h

The essence of this expression is that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the energy of an atomic particle and the time at which it has it, without the uncertainty of its meaning, since the measurement of energy takes some time during which the energy will randomly change.