pianoman1976 Posted September 12, 2010 Report Share Posted September 12, 2010 What are the triangles? What is x, p and what does the h with the line through it mean? Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
capnrefsmmat Posted September 12, 2010 Report Share Posted September 12, 2010 Well, without context, it's really impossible to tell what x and p mean. But h-bar is the Dirac constant, and the [math]\Delta[/math] signs mean "change in." So the change in x times the change in p is greater than or equal to the Dirac constant over 2. I could hazard a guess that p is momentum, but it depends on what p has been defined to be in the context. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erasmus00 Posted September 12, 2010 Report Share Posted September 12, 2010 That's Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. The triangle symbols mean uncertainty in. So the uncertainty in position multiplied by the uncertainty in momentum have to be larger than a constant- this means you can never 100% accurately predict the future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pianoman1976 Posted September 13, 2010 Author Report Share Posted September 13, 2010 Okay, I'm close to getting it. I understand the meaning of the Heisenberg diddy, yet not the mathematics. Most of this makes sense to me except that I thought the Dirac constant was expressed as h/2pi. I flunked out of math class more than once. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maddog Posted September 23, 2010 Report Share Posted September 23, 2010 Most of this makes sense to me except that I thought the Dirac constant was expressed as h/2pi."h-bar" or the Dirac constant is h/2pi. maddog Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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