TechStuff Classic: Say My Name

to listen to this episode. I'm going to experience this again with you guys. Obviously not for the first time. I was there in but dude, I can't remember last Tuesday. So let's sit back and listen to this classic episode. Werner Heisenberg. Right, I'm just not sure about this topic. Heisenberg, Right, okay, wall I think I have some notes on him too, are you? This is he was born on December five, nineteen o one. Yes, that one, the physicist. Yes, the

famous theoretical physicist. All right, well, all right, maybe I won't get a geek out about breaking bad, but that's fine. We can talk about Vernon Heisenberg. I like that your German pronunciation is better than the lady with the last name vocal bomb. That's pretty that's pretty great. Um So born on December five, nineteen o one, in Verzberg. Uh and yeah, Heisenberg has played an incredibly important role in the establishment that that's the foundations of what is quantum mechanics. Right.

If you've heard of something something called the uncertainty principle, that is a k A. Heisenberg's u certain new principle, that that is, he is the operative Heisenberg. In this we will we will explain what that uncertainty principle is in certain terms, but that will be towards the second half of the podcast. First we wanted to kind of talk about who he was, sort of his background. His father was an expert in Middle and modern Greek languages.

That's a Dr. August Heisenberg. His mother was any wink Lin. Winklin wink Lin was w there's no W sound in German. It's um, yeah, so vs or fs and and w s or vs. That's easy to remember, simple, all right, Yeah, so yeah, he he um. It's funny because I understand that his his own background in Greek. His father was

an expert in Greek. His own background in Greek meant that when they got to the point where physicists were starting to name theoretical and he would correct people's use of Greek, saying things like, you cannot spell it this way because that's not how it would be actually spelled if such a thing existed in the Greek language. So so he was, um, you know, helping us stay on the rails as far as the use of Greek, right

while he was growing up. When he was twelve, that is when Neil's Bore presents did his general theory of of quantum existence. Yes, so Bore would be incredibly important during Heisenberg's education. But Niels Bore also known for making the Bore model of the atom. So that was the model the atom that suggested that you had a central nucleus and then electrons that were orbiting nucleus. Yeah, so that's you know, anyone who's taken any any class in

chemistry or physics has seen the Boor model. It's still one of those things that um usually is. It's part of the history of the development of particle physics and quantum mechanics. Right. We we know now that it's a little bit um simplified Yeah. In fact, Heisenberg would go on to be the one who right exactly right, Uh, he was. While he was in high school, there was a major event that played out across the entire world and particularly in Europe. World War One. Yeah, World War

One happened between nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen. So of Heisenberg's academic contemporaries, or not even contemporaries, some of his mentors had actually served in World War One, various officers in the military, right right. Um, Heisenberg himself had to leave school, leave high school to go help harvest crops in Bavaria at the time. And um, by by the time he got back after the war, he was deeply involved in youth groups like the New Boy Scouts. That

we're trying to rebuild the science and artistic culture in Germany. Right, So keep in mind, like at this time in Germany, things are really tumultuous. I mean, World War One was already one of those events that that played upon certain sentiments in Germany, and after the war was concluded, that got even more messy because you had the rest of the world, uh, you know, trying to deal with this situation and make sure that it could not happen again. I mean, this was one of those wars that no

one really expected whatever happened. But as the idea was that everyone would be building up their armies to a point that anyone would be crazy to attack anyone else. And as it turns out, humans are crazy, y'all. So um, yeah, we it was. It was one of those things where where as in an attempt to prevent this from happening again,

there were a lot of reparations demanded against Germany. This in turn ended up fueling a lot of resentment in Germany and would eventually give the Nazi movement sort of the kind of foothold. Yeah exactly, It gave them that that that place to build some support, because you had all these Germans who felt that that their lives had been ruined as a result of the actions that followed World War One. Now that plays a big role in Heisenberg's life because this is also a time when physicists

are making incredible discoveries. We are learning more about the quantum world, that that atomic scale world than ever before. The instruments that were being made were becoming precise enough for us to look at things on a level that we never could have seen before. So there is a figurative explosion in physics at this time and a lot of and sometimes literal explosions. But a lot of the physicists that were active at this time, particularly in Germany,

were of Jewish descent. Now, of course that would cause play another important role once we talk about the rise of the Nazi movement and the entry into World War two. Obviously that's going to to really shake things up. But before we get to that point, we talk more a little about about Heisenberg's educational background. Once World War One had concluded, he attended the Maximilian School at Munich and

then eventually the University of Munich. He originally went to study math, but according to reports, a professor wouldn't let him into an advanced seminar, and that's when he switched to physics. And just imagine what the world would be like without that, I mean, quantum physics, for example, might have a very different approach, particularly when you start talking about people like Schrodinger, and we will and maybe we'll

even mention his cat so uh. At the university, he studied physics with professors like Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, who was a theoretical physicist. Uh he was a physicist who would stay on teaching even during World War Two, so

he stayed in Germany and continued to teach. He did get a little upset that the well more than a little upset that his departments were being completely yet purged of anyone who had any sort of Jewish background, whether they self identified as Jewish or if they had maybe an ancestor the three generations back who was Jewish. Sure. Also, according to some reports, the Nazis considered the theoretical physics

as a field to be Jewish. Yes, yes, because there were there were so many Jewish inkers who were the leaders of theoretical physics that the Nazis looked down upon the entire discipline as being something that was impure and should be completely purged. And in fact, instead they wanted to have Deutsche physique that's German physics as a study as opposed to theoretical physics, so that would also disrupt

the advances that could have happened during that time. Another professor was Wilhelm Karl Ferner Otto Fritz Franvien, you're just enjoying saying these names, aren't you? Will Helm Vien is usually how we we say that, but yes, you're The answer to that question is yes, I love. I love saying German names. Uh. He was a physicist and he focused on black body radiation and electromagnetics magnetism rather and he passed away in n So he died before World

War two began. He died before the Nazis had really taken control of Germany. Um there was Alfred Pringsheim who was a professor of mathematics and had Jewish roots. During the Nazi regime, he would see his entire fortune taken from him. Everything he had inherited a huge fortune and everything he owned was taken by the Nazis. He was eventually forced to change his name to Alfred Israel Prinsheim

because of his Jewish ancestry. One wonderfully racists, you know, the Nazis were not known for being subtle with the way that they treated any one of Jewish heritage. And then a fourth professor was Arthur Rosenthal, who had a focus on geometry as well as dynamical systems, also had

Jewish roots. He would be forced from his position in nineteen thirty six by the Nazis and would eventually immigrate to the United States and nineteen nine and taught at the University of Michigan, which has come up a lot in our conversations recently because that's where Sid went to. But he taught at the University of Michigan, then eventually taught at the University of New Mexico and then later

at Purdue University. So these were the four professors who really kind of sparked Heisenberg's fascination with physics and mathematics, and this is founding in in those subjects exactly, so Somerfeld, Veen, Pringsheim,

and Rosenthal Uh. Then in nineteen two Heisenberg went to Goodingen Goodingen as a University of Goodingen to study physics under some more famous physicists, including Max Bourne, whose focus was on quantum mechanics, particularly in statistical interpretation of the wave functioned which we will talk about again and a little bit because Schrodinger was definitely a wave functioned guy. As it turns out, Heisenberg was different. He did not really look at the wave function of quantum physics. He

was looking at something else. And now I'll explain that when we get there, because that's fun for me. UM. The born Max Boorne was also the director of theoretical physics at the university and was Jewish, so he immigrated to the United Kingdom when the Nazis came into power in Germany and could tinued to research particle physics, well well not quite particle physics, quantum physics and theoretical physics,

as well as teaching in the UK. Then you had James Frank who was a physicistant, studied atomic and subatomic collisions, particularly electrons colliding with adams, and also was of Jewish heritage. So he would leave Germany in nineteen thirty three for the United States and would later participate in what was known as the Manhattan Project. We could do a full episode on the Manhattan Project that in fact, Yeah, it's an amazing story. UM. And here's another great story with

James Frank. So he won the Nobel Prize in n for physics. He left the gold medal, the Nobel Prize medal back in Germany when he left to essentially flee to the United States. Um. There was another physicist named George de Heavasy, and I know I'm saying that name wrong, So I greatly apologize, but for once, we're talking about someone who's not German, so I can't say his name.

But he he in order to protect this gold medal from being taken by the Nazis and melted down, he dissolved the metal and acid and then put the solution on a shelf, so it's a solution with dissolved gold on the shelf. World War two is over, he goes back,

the solution is still on the shelf. He then precipitates that solution, precipitateing the gold out of the acid, and he used the gold to melt it back into the metal and meant a new and meant a new metal so that they can give it uh back to James Frank.

So that I thought was a really cool story. Then there's another professor he studied under was David Hilbert, was a mathematician who focused on geometry and functional analysis, who retired in n So he lived to see the Nazis purge Germany of Jewish mathematicians and physicists, and was later asked at a state dinner. He was actually asked a question about what was the state of mathematics after it had been quote unquote free of Jewish influence, and his

response was, there's no study of mathematics anymore. He was essentially saying that the actions of the Nazis had effectively into the entire field because they had they had removed or or had caused to flee all of the leading thinkers and instead, including like Einstein. So they were turning mathematics and science into a political thing, and by doing that, they were saying that these other things that did not

fit that political regime as invalid. And that's not the way science works, not the way mathematics works, but that's how we're demanding. It can be a very effective means of controlling a population by controlling their education. Sure, but also it also ends up meaning that you really you, you just throw a huge monkey wrench into any kind

of advancement in those fields. So before World War two, this is this is all happening before World War two, and Heisenberg is studying under these different professors, so during these years he has the ability to really pursue his interests in theoretical physics and mathematics. So, uh, this was on the in the nineteen twenties so and so was before even the Third Wreck was coming into power at all. Right, right, so that these are in the years between World War

One and the Nazis rise to power. So during those years, that's when Heisenberg was studying. And while many of his professors would end up having to flee or would be removed from their jobs, at this time none of that

was necessarily evident that that was going to happen. So he spent his time really talking with some of the leading thinkers of the day when it comes to theoretical physics and mathematics, right, um so Ine he earned his PhD from the University of Munich and um went to become an assistant to his old professor Maxi Born at the University of getting In and so in he would go to the University of Copenhagen and begin work with Niels Henrik David Bore, who was Danish, not German, but

a Danish physicist and uh and of course he was really interested in atomic radiation and atomic structure, and we talked about the Boor model of the atom earlier in the podcast um So. In nineteen six Heisenberg would go to the University of Copenhagen for about a year and then leave. But in ninety six there was a position opening opening up at the University of Copenhagen for a

lecturer in theoretical physics. So Boor recommended Heisenberg, thinking that Heisenberg was an up and coming leader in this space, and so Heisenberg became the lecturer and theoretical physics at the University of Copenhagen. Bore himself would be at Copenhagen for quite some time until nineteen forty three, where he would eventually flee to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Nineteen five,

that's when Heisenberg publishes his theory of quantum mechanics. So he was of the ripe old age of twin d three years old, twenty three years old, and he is, uh, he is he is presenting a completely um well, he's presenting his own, his own perspective on what quantum mechanics actually is. As we'll see, that ends up getting kind of assimilated into a unified view by looking at some some other theories that Heisenberg did not necessarily agree with

at the time. Nope, not so much at all. As it turns out, physicists, like any other type of human being, can occasionally get very married to specific ideas and maybe a little bit snarky. Yeah, there's some there's some great

quotes that we'll be reading. Yeah, but yeah, it turns out that not everybody agreed on the behavior of particles at that level because they were first of all, there was no way to really directly observe them, so it's all hypothetical, and it was mostly things like your equations are are not as easy to understand my equations, therefore my equations are better. That kind of thing. In fact, that really is one of the arguments. So in n seven, at the age of twenty six, you know, he's he's

definitely hitting that that middle age there for physicists. Twenty six years old, he becomes the professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leipsig, and this made him the youngest full professor in Germany at the time. Yeah, so he was certainly making a name for himself in the

in the academic world. In nineteen nine, he goes on a lecture tour of the United States and Japan and India, uh and in nineteen thirty two he receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen. It was is for from that paper that he had published about quantum mechanics. Out of that one of the applications was this discovery. Right. So, in case you're wondering what the heck is an allotrope, it's a

different structural modification of an element. So let's take carbon. Carbon is a great example. When you have a certain structure of carbon, it forms graphite. Different structure of carbon forms diamond too, slightly different substances. Yeah, these these different these different manifestations of the same element. I mean, it's it's the exact same element. It's just the way that it's been or the way that it arranges itself determines its qualities. And graphite and diamond are like nine day

they're incredibly different. So that's what an allotrope is is these different manifestations of an element that have very different qualities. With the case of hydrogen, we're talking about ortho hydrogen and parahydrogen. Don't ask me what that actually means because I'm not a physicist or a chemist, so I am incapable of answering me, neither I am. I'm at a loss there, but I do know that in ninety seven Heisenberg married Elizabeth Schumacher, who he would go on to

have seven children with over the course of their marriage. Wow. Now this is also the time when we're starting to see the Nazis come into power in World War two is beginning, and this was This becomes a pretty muddy area of Heisenberg's life because it's hard to know which historical records are the most accurate. Right, There's there's a lot of contention within the historical community about um, what

exactly Heisenberg's personal views and um and roles were. In all of this, he had become the target of of Johannes's Stark n I'm just entering apologize with our English. Our English pronunciation in German pronunciation are different and and to be fair, the vocal downside of my family is is really more like Polish Russian. So Johannes Stark was also a physicist, but he was and he was a physicist in fact, who in his UH in the twenties

had published a paper by Einstein. He had actually the um UH solicited Einstein to write a paper for the publication that he was editing, and it was a publication that would eventually lead Einstein to ruminate upon the general theory of relativity. It was sort of a kind of a precursor to his general theory, which meant that in a way, Johannes Stark was very much part of what

made Einstein a worldwide phenomenon. Now, the reason why I say that's really interesting, or perhaps he might even say ironic, is that Johannes Stark would align himself with the Nazi regime. He wanted essentially to be the fewer of physics, which is that's I mean, that's exactly the way I saw it worded when I was reading the biography, which is

kind of terrifying. But he he also aligned himself with the Deutsche Physics movement, the the German physics movement, and he said that because Heisenberg continued to teach Einstein's theories and classroom in Einstein's theories, of course we're not part

of this Deutsche physics, uh movement. That he was what what Stark would call a white Jew or an arian Jew, someone who is not Jewish by heritage but is by association because he continues to teach these thoughts that Jewish mathematicians and physicists had come up with, so that somehow that meant that he was a traitor. Yes, so um So Stark was very much opposed to Heisenberg and didn't feel that Heisenberg should should have any sort of position

of authority. That did not stop Heisenberg from having that position. He was obviously very important to the university and was

one of the few protected. Of course, part of it was that he did not actually have any Jewish ancestry that anyone could determine, so that kept him somewhat safe, right sure, um you know, there's part of the debate about Heisenberg is whether or not he um he stayed in order to uh to help preserve Germany's scientific and cultural communities, or whether he was actually working for the

Nazi Party. Um. He was made the director of the German Adam Bomb project and spent about five years working on that, supposedly, during which another portion of the debate is whether he was working towards a nuclear reactor or

nuclear weapons, and no one is really entirely sure. Supposedly he gave a report to Nazi official Albert Spear um that as of one or so, it would take three or four years for them to build a nuclear weapon, and that that is part of why the Nazi Party said, I'll forget this nuclear weapon thing, let's go with nuclear

reactors to help drive sure. Um and uh so, but but you know, that's that's there's been other research um for for example, one Paul Lawrence Rose wrote an entire book called Heisenberg and the Nazi Coomic Bomb Project that stated that, uh, Heisenberg wasn't being evasive to the Nazi Party, that rather he was being truthful due to a basic misunderstanding of the way that nuclear fission worked, and that by the time he figured it out, it was when the war was already winding down and he started to

hear about the atrocities that the Nazi Party had committed and kind of reactively recreated this image of himself as as having been an anti Nazi the entire time. And that's the thing is that it's it's impossible for us to say one way or the other because there are conflicting reports and and really it's you know, it's just it's a it's a difficult thing. Again. Once again, we take our our our podcasting hats off to our sister podcast stuff he missed in history class that deals with

this kind of stuff all the time. Oh sure, and and especially you know, everything surrounding the Nazi Party is incredibly sticky. Um. You know, some of my favorite favorite stories about that time or stuff like like like like Lenie Reefinstahl, who was one of the who was the propagandist or a documentary filmmaker for the Nazi Party, And I mean she she took tea with Hitler frequently and has claimed forever that she never knew about the atrocities that were going on. And so it's it's it's one

of those things like who do you believe? Yeah, and uh yeah, getting back into into the what Heisenberg was going through at this time. So there is there's an argument to be made that he was trying to preserve the scientific community in Germany as best he could, because there were others who were also trying to do that. Max Planck, for example, was also trying to um to

do that. Although Plank had hoped that the the rise of the Nazis was just a temporary kind of kerfuffle and that it wasn't going to balloon into this incredible conflict that would span the entire globe. He just had no He had no concept of that actually happening. So he had to stay and to try and keep the German departments of mathematics and physics as intact as possible. So it could be that that's the case, We honestly

don't know. In ninety one, Heisenberg becomes the professor of physics at the University of Berlin and the director of the kaiserville Helm Institute for Physics. And in nineteen forty five Heisenberg is taken prisoner by American troops and is

sent to England. UH. He's freed in nineteen forty six and returns to Germany and helps rebuild the Institute for Physics at Guttingen and then UH that eventually becomes the Max Planck Institute for Physics, which would eventually relocate and I believe I believe Heisenberg personally renamed the institute them on Max Plunks. And he would continue to travel and give lectures about his work, in fact doing so almost

right up to when he died. He died in on February one, nineteen seventy six after developing cancer, so he was very much active in the world of lectures and academia well after the end of World War Two. Yeah, towards the end of his life he became interested in plasma physics and a thermonuclear processes. So see, it's uh,

you know, it's certainly one of those interesting timelines. And in a moment, we're going to really dive into what his contributions were in the field of quantum mechanics and give a full explanation or as as full as we possibly can make it of what the uncertainty principle is all about, as well as why it's important in technology, because yes, this does have to do with tech. It's just going to take us a while to get there. Okay, guys,

I'm not really sure what's about to happen. You could say I'm uncertain, So let's take a quick break, all right, So now it's time to dive into quantum mechanics. I gotta tell you, I'm not really certain about this. I'm just gonna keep making that joke excellent until it's funny. Um. So, yeah, he was. Heisenberg had worked in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics during the early early days of the discipline, and he was particularly interested in studying the radiation from an atom.

But here's the thing that he was also interested in seeing what was actually observable, you know, really look at the atom and see what you could actually see it because we had all these hypothetical particles in these theoretical particles, things that that should exist based upon the math involved.

But but but the science at the time was based on on bombarding these these tiny, tiny, tiny sub atomic particles with um with things like gamma radiation and then observing what we could observe, right, And so he began to differentiate between what you could observe and what you could not, and then he started to notice things. He said that, you know, we can't really always assign a position in space to a specific electron at any given time,

and we can't follow electrons around their orbits. It's it's not like a planetary orbit that we can watch continuously, right, It's more like there's an area that an electron could be in, as opposed to we can specifically point out that this is where the electron is at any given moment, or this is the direction it is traveling at any given moment, and this would start to plant the seed

in his mind for the uncertainty principle. So first he said that you know, bores postulation that the the the orbits of electrons are around the nucleus was more or less correct. You couldn't actually be certain of what those orbits were because the unobservable nature of these electrons move. Yeah, there's just no way to assign a figure to this. You can't say the electron is in uh, this particular quadrant around the nucleus UM and you couldn't talk about

really the electron's velocity either. Velocity, by the way, is speed us direction, right, And so he started to say that instead of using um classic numbers, the kinds of numbers that we would use to describe human scale physics, that that we needed to use matrices. Yeah, and a matrix is essentially an abstract mathematical structure. So this was almost like talking about probabilities. It's it's kind of fuzzy,

it's not specific, it's not precise. And in fact, that was Heisenberg's argument, was that precision is something that you could strive for, but you were never ever going to get Uh, he kind of arrived at this gradually. So in ninety he was involved in a bit of a spat, a debate, if you will, about a theoretical spat actually was real spat about theory, but it was on. So

you had two sides to this debate. You had Heisenberg and his his fellow physicists, who I thought of quantum mechanics in the term of these matrices, these this abstract mathematic way of describing the position or motion of an electron, because again he was arguing that you could not define it in a way that was like it's at x, y and z coordinates. You could not do that. I

was using the matrix. And there was another set of scientists who were trying to describe some atomic particles as as waves the way that we would electromagnetic radiation, unlike or own Strodinger. Yeah, Schrodinger, Schrodinger, Yeah, he and his kitty cat. Actually Schroedinger and the cat story is kind

of interesting, just a little side notes. So you've probably heard of Schrodinger's cat, where Schrodinger was uh, kind of giving a thought experiment kind of thing to explain how how this this other form the matrix form of quantum mechanics is a little weird. The idea that you have a cat inside a box, and inside that box you also have a little canister with poisonous gas estenate, and there's some explosive that has a that that will go

off at some point and I am giving a variation classic. So, so within half an hour there's a fifty chance that the explosive inside that canstor has gone off and released the poisonous gas and little killed the cat. Yes, kitty is no more one life down, eight to go. There's also a fifty percent chance that the that the explosion has not yet happened, and that Kitty is fine but

possibly very bored inside this box. And so the thing is that because of uh, this this weird quantum effect, and keep in mind this is really something that only happens at the quantum level. When you get up to the macro level that we see this is not actually

the case. But the idea is that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, and superposition that has both states and superposition, and it's only when you open up the box and observe the cat that one of those two possibilities becomes true, becomes true, and the other one just becomes yeah, it goes away, and that then you have either the live cat or the dead cat, so that the cat is said to be alive and debt at the same time until you observe it,

and that's when reality snaps into place and you suddenly get one of the two results. And it was kind of a way of saying like this is just, you know, kind of crazy. It's turned out to be one of those things we always refer to anyway. So Schroinger's cat and Heisenberg's and certainty principle both are trying to explain

various weird things about the quantum level. There's another one that we can touch on also that gets confused with Heisenberg's and certainty principle, which is the idea that by

observing something you actually affect the outcome. So in other words, when we're looking at sub atomic particles, simply shining light onto them affects their movement, because we're talking about photons impacting subatomic particles, which changes the pathway, which means just by taking an observation in a measurement, you have changed

what has what was going to happen. So it makes it even more impossible to predict things based upon the behaviors of stuff, because just by observing it, you change what that outcome actually is. Now that's not heisenberg'sun certainty principle either, but it often gets confused. So we've got this debate. We've got the wave mechanics debate, and that's Schrodinger's side, and we've got the matrices debate, and that's Heisenberg's side. And the debate was not always civil. Uh,

there was there. There was a quote that Heisenberg made to another physicist, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, which was, the more I think about the physical portion of Schrodinger's theory, the more repulsive I find it. What Schrodinger writes about the visualizability. Visualizability, Boy, that's a hard word. Of his theory is probably not quite right. In other words, it's crap thick burn. Yeah, that was a little that was a little rough. So

here's what the difference was between these two. Stroutinger's approach require less complicated math to explain the relationship of a sub atomic particles movement and and and it's it's position around a nucleus example, an electron around the nucleus as an example, and it furthermore explained some of the things

that Heisenberg's theory couldn't really fully explain. It's sort of it's sort of pushed them under the rug in a way, because Heisenberg's approach showed that there were these little quantum jumps quantum leaps as if yes, exactly, there's quantum leaps when you cannot quite solve the problem, or you solve the problem and then you have to leap into the next body and hopefully your next leap is the one

that takes you home. No, in this case, the quantum jumps were the fact that you would see electrons behave in a weird way, like suddenly an electron would behave as if it had a higher amount of energy than it normally would, and that was, you know, Heisenberg's approach showed these well with Schroedinger's approach, because we're talking about a continuous wave a wave function, it smooths everything out, so you don't have these jagged, you know, jumps, you

have just a smooth transition um. So the Schroedinger's argument was that, hey, you know, I've looked at the way you are calculating this, and I look at the way I'm calculating this, and it turns out the outcomes are the same. We're getting the same results, but mine requires less complicated math and not all this mathematic abstraction that you are insisting upon. So therefore I'm right and you're wrong,

or at least mine is more eloquent. So you've got these two parties of physicists getting a little caddy Schroedinger caddy. Perhaps um, there are alive cats and dead cats. But then, uh, it's interesting because you started getting into other physicists getting into the game, including Ernst Pascal Jordan's or Jordan I suppose, who was a German physicist who attact later joined the Nazi Party, become part of that movement, in fact enlisted

in the Luftwaffe. Um. And then you had Paul de Rak who was an English physicist who both created unified equations that took the wave function approach and the matrices approach and combine them into what was called a transformation theory,

which is the very basis of quantum mechanics. So again this is all theoretical, it's essentially trying physicists trying to figure out how to to apply the same sort of observation that they had in classical interpretation of physics on the macro scale to the quantum level, which is the incredibly tiny scale the atomic or subatomic scale, at which

their rules do not apply. Right. So, but the transformation theory ended up showing that there was a combination of both Schroedinger's approach and Heisenberg's approach the sort of wave particle duality that we know about with quantum mechanics. That's kind of what was coming out of this discussion. So instead of them both saying no, I'm right, now, I'm right,

these guys are like, well, actually you're both right. Technically, yeah, light is a particle and a wave, and it gets boy, toy doesn't get even more crazy, Like it seems magical to those of us who are used to classical physics on that macro scale, because if things on the macro scale behaved the same way that things in the quantum scale behaved, it would be like we were living in Harry Potter World or something right right there, there would be a lot of a lot of you know, people

suddenly jumping to the left right. Yeah, because you know, or you can never really be sure where someone was or how quickly they were moving and and emitting light when they did it, they'd be half dead and half alive until you looked at them. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of things that would be pretty bizarre in our world. We'll be right back with more of this classic episode

of tech stuff after this quick break. So Heisenberg studied Jordan and de Rocks papers and found that there were probably ms whenever he tried to measure the basic physical variables appearing in the equations. And by physical variables, I mean an electrons position and its momentum. So that led Heisenberg to create the famous principle of uncertainty, which he did in nine seven. We usually call that Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

So here's here's how it breaks down. The more precisely you determine the position of a sub atomic particle, for example, an electron around the nucleus, So the more precisely you determine its position, the less precisely you can know about the momentum at that moment, and vice versa. So if you more precisely determine the subotomic particles momentum, the less

precisely you can know its actual position, right um. So specifically, he was saying that um that running the calculation for this, for this determination of the position and the momentum um necessarily contains errors, the product of which physically cannot be less than the quantum constant h Plancks constant, which is the smallest unit the quantum of action in an atom. Right. And so what he's saying here is that it doesn't

matter how advanced your measurement apparatus is. In fact, there was one point where More criticized Heisenberg's approach because he said that he was using essentially microscopes that were not

precise enough, and in fact it made an error. And then Heisenberg got really upset a Bore, and the two of them had a falling out that lasted about a year, and then Heisenberg eventually wrote a paper and acknowledge He said, you know, Bore has criticized this because of such and such, an acknowledged that in fact there was an error, but said that ultimately that error was beside the point because it would not matter how precise that was the fact

remained that the more you would learn about one thing, the less you could know about the other. That's the uncertainty or complimentarianism is another way that some people have said that there's this complementary relationship between the momentum and the position. So in case you I want to know what momentum is, that's mass times velocity. Velocity is that speed and direction, So that's important to know. So on

the human scale, this uncertainty is completely negligible. There's you might as well just throw it out the window because on our scale it just doesn't that it doesn't factor into it. It's such a tiny thing. But when you look at the smaller scales, this tiny tiny thing becomes huge because you're looking at things on an incredibly small scale.

And because we can't know but with precision both a sub atomics particles, a position and its momentum, we cannot really make predictions about what's going to happen in the future. And in fact, uh this is where Heisenberg says causality becomes a problem because if you cannot determine that subatomic particles position and momentum, you cannot actually know what's going

to happen next. So if you were to expand this out, now this is this is to the absurd, But if you were to expand this out, you could say that you cannot for certain know that by doing a certain action,

a particular effect is going to follow. That's not really the case with classical physics again, because we're talking about the macro scale, but on the qualm scale, that's the case we cannot really know what will happen from one moment to the next because we can't know enough about all the factors to make that determination, which is which is kind of wonderful and kind of terrifying right simultaneously,

and though it's a cat in a box yep. And and then this also ties into that observation problem, right because if we even if we observe the phenomenon, then we're affecting, we're changing the phenomens. We're making it even more impossible to determine what the effect is going to be. The cause and effect at the scale is something that becomes purely theoretical, because as soon as you try and

apply practical approaches to it, it all breaks down. And we promise this really does relate directly to technology, we're getting there. So we then show that light can be interpreted as both wave functions and as a particle. That's with Boor and Heisenberg together working, they were able to kind of come to this conclusion. And as soon as you decide how to observe a particular experiment, that interpretation

become is true and the other interpretation collapses. So, in other words, if you're looking at light as a wave, you see it as a wave. If you look at light as a particle, you see it as a particle, and the other half of that interpretation goes away, which is insane. They were talking about it about how how you observe the experiment, we disturb untouched nature and we become limited and learning about nature as it really is.

In other words, we have a very narrow view into what reality is, and once we focus that view on something, we cannot know everything else that's outside of that view. So imagine that you have a telescope and you are using that telescope to look at something that's on the distant horizon, and you can see that you can see the thing that's on the horizon, but everything else has

faded away. It's like all of that's just gone. That's kind of what the sort of an analogy as to what he was saying here, which is disturbing to think about in a way, but that's how reality works, so you gotta come of deal with it um. So Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in Stringer's wave functions become the basis of

the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the reason why we even did this podcast besides the fact that I think someone actually asked us to and Lauren's going to look that up, but the reason why we're doing this is because heisenberg'suncertainty principle plays into the way that we use electronics today, because now we're working with electronics that have components that are on this tiny, tiny skin at least the nano scale, which is one one factor up

from atomic but far away. The flow of electrons is critical for modern absolutely and while we're making these tiny transistors or transistor elements that are part of these integrated circuits, you know, the whole purpose of transistors is to guide the flow of electrons, to allow them to pass or to not allow them to pass through a circuit. Well,

if you make the gates really thin. Heisenberg's and certainty principle tells us that there is a kind of a zone in which you might find an electron, and because of the uncertainty about the electron's momentum or energy, sometimes that electron can jump up an energy level because of our uncertainty, we we you know, it just will pop up an energy level and then pop back down, which means they can be found in a slightly larger zone than you would not necessarily expect based upon its actual

energy level, which can be problematic when when you've got these incredibly thin gates that are supposed to be keeping an electrons on one side, right, that that zone might extend beyond the far side of that gate. And if the zone extends beyond the far side of the gate, that means that it's possible for an electron to appear on the other side of the gate without having actually

passed through that circuit, which means called electron tunneling. And since it's possible, it happens, which which means that, yeah, unless we figure out ways of getting around these you know, these these fundamental quantum phenomena that we you know, there's a point where you cannot make the components any smaller because the electrons just won't play ball. They're just gonna go every way that the fundamental quantum traffic laws, as

you put it in our exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it means that that you're you're gonna get errors in your various chips because they will not be allowing the or or preventing the electrons from flowing the way they're supposed to, because the electrons are just going to be able to tunnel right through when when those uh, those energy levels bump up uncertainly. It's bizarre, it's so weird to think

about um. But engineers have found ways of working around that, using different materials that uh that that minimize this so that they can continue to make things smaller and smaller. But we will reach a point when that is just not going to be the way that chips will be

designed anymore. Either will will plateau and we won't be able to make chips with smaller components, or will find a different means of useing sub atomic particles to process information, and we'll move away from electron based chips, which is hard to consider. It's really weird to think about. Yeah, that's not that that that is beyond my entire brain right now. Yeah, I'm actually starting to feel a nosebleed coming on because I'm a I'm an English literature major.

Al Right, well, let's let's bring this back to something, to something a little bit more peaceful and serene. I have I have a quote from Heisenberg via via pds um. He once said natural science does not simply describe and explain nature. It's part of the interplay between nature and ourselves. It describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. That's pretty cool, which I thought was nice. I thought that that was a much less nosebleedy way of saying

that that we mess stuff up scientifically. And also it also is less uh nasty than his note to U or note about Shrodinger. Right. So um oh, I found the name of the person who requested this via Facebook. This was from listener Peter. So Peter asked us about this, and I hope that we were able to answer your questions to uh your satisfaction. It was certainly to the best of our ability, keeping in mind that neither of us are theoretical physicists. Not by a long show mathematicians

for that matter. Uh fascinating subject, and there are a lot of books out there that are really really good about explaining Heisenberg's role and also the contributions of his contemporaries, everyone from Einstein to Somerville, to Schroedinger to to all all the great physicists of the nineteen twenties and thirties who have really made modern technology possible through their discoveries. And that wraps up another classic episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any

suggestions for future topics, reach out to me. You can get in touch on Twitter or on Facebook. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.