Chapter 4: The Uncertainty Principle

Newton's theory of gravity caused Marquis de Laplace to believe that scientific laws could be made to predict everything that could happen in the universe. However, we are unable to calculate the randomness of the position of an object in space. The value of this theory can represented through the uncertainty principle. A man by the name of Max Planck proposed the idea that waves could only be emitted in specific packets, which he called quanta. The quantum hypothesis proposed by Planck also helped establish the uncertainty principle. A man named Werner Heisenburg represented the uncertainty of the position of an object multiplied by the uncertainty of that object velocity could not be smaller than the quantity known as Planck's constant. The value of Planck's constant is represented as 6.626 X 10^-34.

The uncertainty principle explains that you cannot know the exact position of a particle in the universe because the calculations are out of our reach. The observations of Planck's constant and the idea of random placements of particles in space led Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Paul Dirac to propose the theory of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and is based of the idea of the uncertainty principle. Quantum mechanics predicts the number of possible different positions that an object in space could be and calculates the most likely outcome. Although these quantities can not be used to predict the exact location of a particle in space, it narrows the locations down to a specific area.