9. Quantum Mechanics
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Struggling with General Chemistry?
Join thousands of students who trust us to help them ace their exams!Watch the first video
Video duration:
1mRelated Videos
Related Practice
Skip to main content
Now, the physicist Werner Heisenberg theorized that the velocity and position of an electron cannot be calculated simultaneously. Meaning that you might know the velocity or speed of an electron as it's traveling, but you won't know its position. And conversely, you might know where it's located, but you wouldn't know how fast it's moving. Now related to an electron be hidden both as a wave and a particle is a reason for this issue. We're going to say here that the velocity or speed of an electron is related to its wave nature. Remember, light energy can move in the form of a wave, and we're gonna say that the position of an electron is related to its particle nature. Again, some say that light energy can be seen as just a cluster of particles known as photons. Now this relationship we call it complementarity, where electrons can be seen as either particles or waves, but not both simultaneously. And that's the the reason why you can't know both the velocity and position of an electron at the same exact time.
02:05
