This means that bouncing a photon off of an electron will have a significant influence on its velocity. However, the masses of photons and electrons are much more similar to one another. Heisenberg attempted to discover the position of an electron in a similar way – by bouncing photons off of it. However, the picture is a bit different in the quantum realm. The key here is that the mass and velocity of photons are so miniscule with comparison to that of the tennis ball that they have a negligible effect on it. So, for example, if we attempt to understand the position and velocity of a tennis ball, a stream of photons reflected off the tennis ball are recorded and allow us to gain information about it. The photons carry information about what it has bounced off of, and this information is interpreted by our optical nerve or recorded by photographic imaging. When we see something in the macro realm, the level of physical objects that we can observe with the senses, it is because photons bounce off of the object and return to the eye. In order to understand the earliest incarnation of the uncertainty principle, we have to consider the nature of measurement. This means that in the quantum realm, the smallest realm of nature, there is an absolute limit to what can be known. What he discovered was that the more accurately the position of an electron could be known, the less we could know about its momentum. While at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg conducted an experiment attempting to determine the position and velocity of an electron. This principle was first discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, known simply as the Uncertainty Principle, describes a fundamental limit to what is knowable about the world.
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