Q.State Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that for a microscopic particle, the position and momentum cannot both be measured with unlimited precision simultaneously; the product of their uncertainties has a fixed minimum value.
Werner Heisenberg proposed that for very small (microscopic) particles like electrons, it is fundamentally impossible to determine both the exact position and the exact momentum (or velocity) at the same instant. This is not a limitation of measuring instruments — it is an inherent property of matter at this scale, arising from the wave nature of particles.
Mathematically, if Delta x is the uncertainty in position and Delta p is the uncertainty in momentum, then:
Delta x . Delta p >= h / (4 pi)
where h is Planck's constant. This means that if we try to measure a particle's position very precisely (making Delta x very small), the uncertainty in its momentum (Delta p) must become correspondingly large, and vice versa; the product of the two uncertainties can never be smaller than h/(4 pi).
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