Does the uncertainty principle work with time as well? Is there less certainty as to where a particle is in time, when it has a lot of energy?

The wiki says something like, if a particle exists only very briefly it is hard to say what its energy is because it exists for less long than it would take to travel its quantum wavelength [everything is a wave in quantum mechanics].

Me and Alphanumeric where talking about this not long ago. It seems I was thinking along the sames lines as Einstein once thought.... I was wrong.

He was right - the uncertainty between energy and time seems to be empiracle.

It's not an exact relation like the other uncertainty principles, but there is a general rule of thumb for it. If you have a system which consists of a superposition of states having different energies, then the system itself doesn't have a well-defined energy of its own, but rather a wavefunction of probabilities to collapse into states of various energies, with the wavefunction having a spread (standard deviation) we call "\Delta E. Then if \Delta t is the average time for the system to oscillate from one state to another without its wavefunction collapsing into a state of definite energy, the relationship: \Delta E \Delta t \raisebox{-5pt}{\overset{>}{\sim}}\hbar/2 usually holds to reasonable accuracy.

The uncertainty principle can be demonstrated via a effect in photography, called motion blur, which was around decades before uncertainty principle was discovered at the atomic scale. If anything photography tried to get rid of this effect until maybe others forgot.

To get motion blur (or uncertainty), the shutter speed of the camera only needs to be slower than the action. The diifference in time, with time stopped (still picture) is capture in the photo and expressed via uncertainty in distance.

With the camera and motion blur, we are aware of two timed events (motion and shutter) are not exactly the same. Only the faster action will be blurred while the slower action will be sharp. But with atoms and other events at the sub-physics scale, we assume this is only one time associated with this motion blur effect. The uncertainty in time is an artifact of traditions, since one should be able to calculate the second time based on the motion blur.

The picture below is an example of motion blur, where the speed of the action is both faster and slower than the shutter speed. If we know position (clear point in the pic) we can't tell the momentum. If we know momentum sense of action, we can't tell postion (motion blur). I am not sure why traditions are so hard to break. Maybe the mystery of uncertainty is a type of religion or the foundation of science magic.

http://examplesof.com/photography/motionblur/pleasures-of-small-motions.jpg

I'm not sure whether you'd consider it "the" (Heisenberg) Uncertainty Principle, but there is most certainly an uncertainty principle relating time and frequency - the more localized in time a distribution is, the less localized in frequency, and vice versa. Your classic Fourier basis functions have perfect frequency resolution, but no time resolution - they extend off to infinity in both directions, for example.

This applies more to spectrum analysis than quantum physics per se, although there are sufficient connections between the two that one can easily rephrase it in physics terms if desired. Indeed, I've always viewed the Heisenberg Uncertainty principles as simply the application of the basic Fourier transform theory result to instances of physical quantities that are related by Fourier transform.

The uncertainty principle can be demonstrated via a effect in photography
Nope. Not the same thing at all.

The color gold, of the metal gold, is due to relativity of the outer electrons causing a time shift in the reflected light frequency toward yellow. This is an obvious example of the outer electrons in a different reference than the inertial observer. It is not one time reference. I would expect the excess time potential between reference to create Heisenberg motion blur.

Using photography and time we can also explain why we have quanta, which nobody else can explain with any other theory. Yet, it prefer to remain another mystery foundation for theory. Go figure?????

In the case of quanta, instead of the still photography and motion blur (uncertainty), we need to use an invention that was around in the 1890's, before quantum effects were defined. This invention was called the motion picture.

In this case, we have two timed aspects within the camera. We have shutter speed for each frame and we have frame rate. There is also the third time within the action we are filming. I won't go through all the combinations but will leave you with the quantum child quantum stepping. If we alter the the two times of the camera we can tweak him.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3602/5773824548_0c0f97e743.jpg

The color gold, of the metal gold, is due to relativity of the outer electrons causing a time shift in the reflected light frequency toward yellow. This is an obvious example of the outer electrons in a different reference than the inertial observer.
Link please.


Using photography and time we can also explain why we have quanta
Wrong.

Me and Alphanumeric where talking about this not long ago. It seems I was thinking along the sames lines as Einstein once thought.... I was wrong.

He was right - the uncertainty between energy and time seems to be empiracle.

I've been there as well, I almost convinced myself about nothing in particular..


It's not an exact relation like the other uncertainty principles, but there is a general rule of thumb for it. If you have a system which consists of a superposition of states having different energies, then the system itself doesn't have a well-defined energy of its own, but rather a wavefunction of probabilities to collapse into states of various energies, with the wavefunction having a spread (standard deviation) we call "\Delta E. Then if \Delta t is the average time for the system to oscillate from one state to another without its wavefunction collapsing into a state of definite energy, the relationship: \Delta E \Delta t \raisebox{-5pt}{\overset{>}{\sim}}\hbar/2 usually holds to reasonable accuracy.

So a system has several possible energies, with different probabilities of becoming this energetic? This is really confusing to me.

Are you talking about particles?


I'm not sure whether you'd consider it "the" (Heisenberg) Uncertainty Principle, but there is most certainly an uncertainty principle relating time and frequency - the more localized in time a distribution is, the less localized in frequency, and vice versa. Your classic Fourier basis functions have perfect frequency resolution, but no time resolution - they extend off to infinity in both directions, for example.

This applies more to spectrum analysis than quantum physics per se, although there are sufficient connections between the two that one can easily rephrase it in physics terms if desired. Indeed, I've always viewed the Heisenberg Uncertainty principles as simply the application of the basic Fourier transform theory result to instances of physical quantities that are related by Fourier transform.

So, its not certain that a particle is really 'there' ... at what time scales and sizes is this relevant?

The Uncertainty Principle is really quite simple a concept. We see it every day.

A car travels 1 mile in 1 minute from point A to point B.


The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.

If the car is at point A at 12:00, and at point B 1 mile away from point A at 12:01, those positions are known, and the motion is unknown, as no time elapses between 12:00 and 12:00 at point A where the car is at 12:00, nor does any time elapse between 12:01 and 12:01 when the car is at point B.

The motion occurs over a duration of time, the car travelED 1 mile in 1 minute. That is the motion and the car is not at a single point during the 1 minute of travel.

As Heisenberg understood, THE MORE YOU PINPOINT THE POSITION, THE LESS THE MOTION IS KNOWN.

The car was at point A at 12:00. The motion at 12:00 is unknown. The car was at point B at 12:01, the motion at 12:01 is unknown.

The car traveled the distance of 1 mile from point A to point B in one minute. The motion is known, but the position is unknown, as the car doesn't have an exact position while in motion for the duration of 1 minute.

The car traveled the distance of 1 mile from point A to point B in one minute. The motion is known, but the position is unknown, as the car doesn't have an exact position while in motion for the duration of 1 minute. Hmm. So there's no absolute frame of reference then?

BTW, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to very small particles like electrons. It isn't something we see every day, and it has bugger all to do with large objects like cars.

I'm not sure whether you'd consider it "the" (Heisenberg) Uncertainty Principle, but there is most certainly an uncertainty principle relating time and frequency - the more localized in time a distribution is, the less localized in frequency, and vice versa.

The uncertainty principle follows from the same considerations, where the frequency of a quantum wave is proportional to its energy.


This applies more to spectrum analysis than quantum physics per se, although there are sufficient connections between the two that one can easily rephrase it in physics terms if desired. Indeed, I've always viewed the Heisenberg Uncertainty principles as simply the application of the basic Fourier transform theory result to instances of physical quantities that are related by Fourier transform.

That's exactly right.

The uncertainty principle follows from the same considerations, where the frequency of a quantum wave is proportional to its energy.

That's not actually the case here. In quantum mechanics, position and momentum are Fourier transform conjugates and so there's an exact uncertainty principle which holds here (i.e. "Heisenberg's principle"). Using similar logic, there's also an uncertainty principle for angular momentum, although the derivation is slightly different because the components of angular momenta aren't Fourier transform conjugates.

In the case of energy, if you have a state with a precisely known energy E, and T is the time for the state to undergo a periodic oscillation in its complex phase coefficient, then the exact relation ET=2\pi\hbar holds. For a state in a superposition of energies with standard deviation \Delta E, you get \Delta E \Delta t \raisebox{-5pt}{\overset{>}{\sim}}h (notice I dropped the "bar" on the h here, which I forgot to do in my last post) as an approximate rule of thumb. I also dropped the factor of 1/2 from my last post, but it doesn't really matter since this particular uncertainty principle is only an approximation. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Energy-time_uncertainty_principle

An example of the energy-time uncertainty rule of thumb can be seen in the Breit-Wigner distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Breit%E2%80%93Wigner_distribution) of particle decays.


So a system has several possible energies, with different probabilities of becoming this energetic? This is really confusing to me.

Are you talking about particles?

Correct. Any time you have a system consisting of a superposition of states with different energies, you have a built-in uncertainty in the actual energy of your system, as it has probabilities to collapse into states with various different energies. This is why the concept of vacuum energy is used so much- you can argue that certain quantum processes borrow energy from the vacuum and repay it later, or you can take the view that we simply don't (and fundamentally can't) know the system's exact energy content in the first place, other than to set it up in the same initial state every time and measure or predict the probability distribution for the energies we observe. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, if an isolated system had an exact well-defined energy, it would be frozen in time and never evolve or change.

Tt's Time which apply to uncertainty principle. At fluctuating extreme levels [my Extreme Level Theory], or in vibrating strings, time is 'certain' but uncertain to us.