Is it really uncertainty?

[firewolfsm]

So...most of what I want to say is in the title, it's just an idea I had while looking at a diagram. It showed a "particle" passing through a wave that was "detecting" it's position and velocity at the same time. Depending on the properties of the wave, those values had a set amount of uncertainty. That's basically the uncertainty principle. The particle can be anywhere along the wave.

What if they aren't detecting particles at all, but waves.

and I can extend this, but I'm really unsure if I understand string theory at ALL

what if they're detecting waves along strings?

We've had this idea of particles for so long and I it makes more sense than not, that they don't apply to physics today. Wouldn't we be able to explain the uncertainty principle if we defined particles as waves and completely abandon the idea of particles.

Of course, this is only one part of quantum mechanics so I'm not implying that we can explain it away with this...I'm not really sure where I'm going with this anyways.

 

[CycloWizard]

I'm not an expert in this area (where did f95toli disappear to anyway??), but I think that physicists have agreed that the uncertainty principle simply limits our ability to define the state of the universe at any given time. This doesn't imply that all of the things we're looking at are really particles. In fact, Hawking actually says that what we are observing might actually be waves but we can only observe discrete points along the waves.

As someone who designs instruments to measure things but knows exceptionally little about things below the nanoscale, it seems to me that someday a new measurement technique might be developed that overcomes the need to use light to measure all of these properties. If this were accomplished, then we might be able to answer your question. However, I have no idea what could be used instead of light, so it's just pure speculation on my part. 😛

 

[silverpig]

So the real answer is that in the nanoscale there is no such thing as a particle, and no such thing as a wave. Whatever those little things are, they have properties of both, but are neither one nor the other.

And don't get started on string theory because:

1. The strings themselves are much too small to be influenced by any bulk measurements we make (we're not able to detect strings so we can't really guess at what they do).
2. String theory seems to be falling out of favour a little bit.
3. Don't worry about not understanding it... most people with Ph.Ds in theoretical physics don't understand it.

The diagram you saw was just an analogy. Take a quick gander at the wikipedia entry for the uncertainty principle and see if it helps you understand it better.