ec2-3-138-174-174.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Ack, put my foot in it, claiming that this exists :)
To put it, horribly, simply: The universe can be represented, on extremely tiny scales at least, as a ProbabilityField?. Events in that field can be represented as waves through it.
Due to the way waves interact in a closed environment (or, on a small scale, in an open one) there are only countably infinite ways in which energy can exist - energy is quantised, not continuous.
Due to (HandWaving?) minimal energy involved in observing an event, it is impossible to know both the momentum and (damn, I forgot, what's the derivative of momentum called?) of an event. Back in ParticleLand?, this means we can know precisely where something is, or how fast it is moving, but not both. The TotalPrecisionOfKnowledge has an UpperBound?.
(PeterTaylor) It's not hand-waving: it's a SchwartzInequality?. (As a matter of fact, it's a special case of a SchwartzInequality? called the Gabor-Heisenberg-Weyl Uncertainty Relation - I love winding up physicists by observing that what they study is a special case of something CompScis? study in Part II).
Sure - it's my explanation of it that was HandWaving?, no the contents. Thanks for filling in the LongWords? ;) --Vitenka
Anyone for a really bad joke? Ok. Heisenberg is driving along in his car when a policeman flags him down. He pulls over to the side of the road and winds his window down. The policeman gets out, walks up to Heisenberg's window and says "Do you know how fast you were going just then?". Heisenberg replies "No, but I know *where* I was." I warned you it was bad. --Qqzm
This leads to InterestingResults? in InformationTheory (which happily says 'cool - we can represent the WholeUniverse? in binary, as long as we only know the value of some of the bits') and in ChaosTheory? (Justified at last! It's impossible to know enough about the starting state to get perfect newtonian style results)
Annyway - I'm sure someone who has actually studied the damn thing will now jump in with more info. Possibly including HilbertSpaces?. I'll see if I can find the decent online primer (first year course material) again.
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QuantumPhysics