In Our Time28 Mar 2024

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what’s known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.

With

Fay Dowker Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London

Harry Cliff Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge

And

Frank Close Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Philip Ball, Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (Vintage, 2018)

John Bell, ‘Against 'measurement'’ (Physics World, Vol 3, No 8, 1990)

Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, And The Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2010)

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (first published 1958; Penguin Classics, 2000)

Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (Penguin, 2022)

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1107)

In Our Time Returns for a New Series

In Our Time returns for a new series with host Misha Glenny.A world class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, phil...

7 Sep 2min

Archive: Empress Dowager Cixi

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fifth choice, first released in May 2024, is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who, for almost ...

3 Sep 51min

Archive: Plate Tectonics

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fourth choice, first released in January 2008, explores how the science of plate tectonics revolu...

27 Aug 44min

Archive: Hatshepsut

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His third choice, first released in November 2014, is the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, whose name mea...

20 Aug 47min

Archive: Coffee

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His second choice, first released in December 2019, is the history and social impact of coffee. From ...

13 Aug 56min

Pockets (from Here For The History)

To the frustration of many, a lot of women’s clothes don’t have pockets. But why on Earth is that the case? Especially when men’s clothing seems to be full of pockets.On Here For The History, Alice Lo...

7 Aug 37min

Archive: Aphra Behn

Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers ...

6 Aug 52min

Seashells

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a familiar feature of our beaches: seashells, from their astonishing shapes and patterns that teach us about Earth’s oceans, to the ways that humans have treasured shel...

30 Jul 53min