my paper cut on popular science quantum physics

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:41:21 +0100

This might be a bit of a reflected version of a post from 2016, triggered by some popular science videos. I have the vague impression that there’s something that I don’t like about many popular science pieces on quantum physics and I haven’t quite generalized it until now: “They” are not distinguishing between the uncertainty properties of quantum-stuff and the idealizations that every model makes in modelling the world.

A look back at Newtonian Physics

Let’s discuss a billiard ball on a billiard table. In Newtonian Physics one could describe that as an extended body with perfectly known position, shape, momentum, angular momentum together with other perfectly known positions \(\mathbf{x}_0\), shapes, momenta \(\mathbf{p}_0\) of other balls and table edges and perfectly known properties of the table (rolling resistance, brush direction of the hair, bounciness of the edges, friction when bouncing with a spin), etc, and one could perfectly predict how the balls will move. (Newton’s laws could be spelled out in an incredibly complicated differential equation¹, which might have one unique solution, which could maybe be found, …)

Heisenberg's uncertainty not so relevant after all?

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 20:00:00 +0100

Discussing design aspects of particle physics detectors, one might hit a point where one seems to have a tradeoff between spatial resolution and momentum resolution. Discussing this with generic particle physics theorists, one hears that this is not worth mentioning as clearly when measuring individual particles, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle plays a role. But does it?

Physics on Yet another blog restart

my paper cut on popular science quantum physics

A look back at Newtonian Physics

Heisenberg's uncertainty not so relevant after all?