What are, if any, macro effects that can be directly attributed to this?

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

The fundamental idea is that observation affects that which is observed. It's a problem in wildlife biology as much as it is in physics. You go electroshocking an entire stream, not once, not twice, but three times in order to be statistically certain that you got at least 95% of the fish--hey, that's bound to have some effects. And those are certainly macro effects.

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Everybody wants to rule the world--Tears for Fears

In a word, none. The uncertainty limit too small to have any effect for macroscopic objects. The limit is Planck's constant divided (4 times pi). That value is about 5.37x10^-35, with units of Joules times seconds. This is the "error" in our measurements due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

A 100 watt light bulbs puts out 100 Joules of energy each second. For comparison, the energy of a one-ton car driving at 60 mph is 0.326 Joules. We might be able to measure that to more places if we wanted to, but not to enough places that uncertainty would be significant.

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Are you my mummy?

For the record, even though a lot people agree with Warren's comments, I find it absurd to claim that this is an extension of uncertainty in any way. Uncertainty at the quantum level is built into the universe, and it's a basic property. Pandering to the camera (or the anthropologist), consciously or subconsciously, is not the same phenomenon.

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Are you my mummy?

Ditto Tobin wrt Warren's comment, plus this:

Kinetic energy of a one ton car at 60 mph (relative to the road surface):

1 short English ton ~ 907 kg.
60 mph ~ 26.7 m/sec

Newton = kg-m/sec^2, a unit of force (mass times acceleration)

Joule = kg-(m/sec)^2 = N-m, a unit of work (force times distance) or energy (mass times velocity squared)

Watt = Joule/s, a unit of power (energy over time)

So I make it 647 Kilojoules, give or take.

According to James Watt (who extrapolated for data from ponies, sez the ever-unreliable Wikipedia), a horse can sustain an energy output of mechanical work (e.g. turning a millstone) at the rate of 746 Watts, i.e. can keep 7 light bulbs lit for several hours. Supposedly a real horse pulling real hard can produce more like 11 Kilowatts over a shorter period of time.

If our car hits something and suddenly comes to rest (wrt the road surface), 647 Kilojoules is the amount of energy it must expend, in a hurry. So if it stops in a tenth of a second, you could say that the car very briefly produces (on average) an impressive 6 Megawatts. (Unfortunately, this energy is mostly wasted in crumpling the car and the barrier, so it cannot be used to keep 1667 lightbulbs lit for one hour.)

For comparison, a modern railroad locomotive sustainably produces about 6 Megawatts while hauling a heavy train. This power is converted (I guess) into waste heat (via friction with the rails) and local atomospheric turbulence (the engine must push air out of its path, and then there is aerodynamic drag).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(speed)
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...oldid=16259988
for conversions to geometric units, in which

• angular momentum is measured in units of area,
• mass, energy, and time are all measured in units of length,
• velocity is dimensionless,
• acceleration is measured in units of 1/length (units of path curvature) ,
• energy density, momentum density, and pressure are measured in units of 1/area (units of sectional curvature)

Something I learned from Isaac Asimov: most of the 100 Watts required to operate a lightbulb goes into radiant heat, not visible light. A living human also produces about 100 Watts of waste heat. That's why cramming them into black holes makes 'em testy.

Exercise: get some incandescent lightbulbs (not the Mercury vapor kind!) and drop them from 0.5-2m to determine the average height required to break them. Use your knowledge of Newtonian physics to deduce the energy required to break a lightbulb. Compare with the energy required to keep one lit for six hours. Ponder the ease of destruction versus doing useful work. Then spend some time with ATM, the only place I know where destruction counts as useful work ;-/

Exercise (for those who know how to compute the Newtonian gravitional binding energy of the Sun): what would be the Newtonian energy required to spaghettify the Sun? (That is, radially compress orthogonal to some axis of axial symmetry while simultaneously elongating twice as fast along the axis of symmetry, which changes the surface from a sphere to a prolate spheroid while keeping the volume constant.)

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Chris Hillman

Read these PF posts. Avoid Wikipedia--- except for these versions. Read this and this suggested sticky. When asked for advice, I always say: never take advice!

I find that one of the interesting things about the uncertainty principle ΔxΔp≥h/2π can be made "visible" for the lay person by discussing the macrocosmos.

Suppose you have a car driving on the street and you are standing on the pavement with your new digital SLR camera. Now you can do two things with that camera:
1. you can take a pic with a very short exposure time, you can see the car clearly, and determine its location very well, however, you have no information about the speed of the car.
2. you can take a pic with a long exposure time, you will see a very blurred car, stretched over the picture, so you can determine the velocity of the car rather well, but any information about the exact location of the car is lost.

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
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Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

I do not want to attempt to answer this question because I am not sure I understand it;
I do want to offer this however; The uncertainty principal dictates that just what you did not think could happen does. Just as what you expected does not... This macro evidence what can we offer as proof... All of it. And none of it. I understand me. Does anyone else?

As Tobin Dax stated, such macro observations have nothing to do with the Uncertainty Principle.

No, it has nothing to do with the quantum mechanical UP, but it does help lay persons to understand what we scientists mean, taking a picture of a car (a one time event) can either give the location to a high degree of certainty with no info on the momentum (speed) of the car, or you get the speed rather well determined and lose the info on the precise location of the car.

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Great analogy. Seems like light sure is a big deal no matter where you look, even in analogies.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

tusenfem showed graphically a wonderful example of the concept of the uncertainty principle.

in a nut shell, when an observer like yourself is trying to find and measure a particle, say for instance an electron in a region of space, you will find that the electron is moving, and the more precise you try to measure the "momentum" of the electron, you find that the position of the electron is uncertain.

but why does this happen?

from what i understand, and i may be wrong, but when you try to look at a particle (say an atom), you need a way to observe that particle so you would need to use a photon to observe or see it by looking at the reflected photon. However, when the photon entangled the particle, it changed the momentum/position of the particle by an uncertain amount which would be inversely proportional to the [accuracy] of the position measurement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

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Disclaimer: I have no theories, I am not smart enough to come up with theories. I only have a hypothesis. So anything I may write, statement or otherwise is just a hypothesis based on what I observe...

The difference between a correlation and a causation... Everyone who drinks water dies... Water makes things wet...

Hmm. Virtual particle/antiparticle pairs, and their relative Hawking radiation; poorly defined energy levels of short-lived states - keeping in mind the Heisenberg's principle doesn't just apply to how we measure but to how states interact. There must be another application just eluding me at the moment.

100 J/s = .134 HP

It takes considerably more horsepower (approximately 40 HP) to sustain your average 2,000 lb vehicle at 60 mph.

40 HP = 29,828 joule/second.

Your statement comparing HP with Joules is a misnomer, as the HP equivalent in the SI system is J/s, not merely Joules.

That and the value of your figure itself is off by several orders of magnitude...

By the way, 100 watt = 100 joule/second.

Thus, a 1 ton car at 60 mph requires 298 times the energy to sustain it's velocity than what it takes to light a 100 W light bulb.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Mine: "Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that."

Heinlein's: "Staying young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." "Freedom begins when you tell Ms. Grundy to go fly a kite."

I see. Apparently he meant the kinetic energy of a 2,000 body moving at 60 mph relative to the ground. That still doesn't excuse his direct comparison of work to energy.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Mine: "Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that."

Heinlein's: "Staying young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." "Freedom begins when you tell Ms. Grundy to go fly a kite."

Tobin was clearing referring to the kinetic energy of a one ton automobile moving at 60 mph relative to the road surface. This computation need take no account of frictional forces or air resistance; the same result would be obtained if we envisioned a 907 kg projectile approaching an asteroid at 26.7 m/s.

Mugaliens is referring to the power (energy per unit time) which is required to sustain the automobile's motion, which is the energy lost to frictional forces, air resistance, or "waste heat" (once the car has gotten up to speed; I guess the engine has to work a bit harder in the acceleration phase, especially if the driver puts the pedal to the metal).

For the mathematically inclined: someone should probably mention that the Uncertainty Principle can be considered to arise naturally in functional analysis (the study of linear operators on function spaces, which are typically infinite dimensional, and are often examples of a Hilbert space or Banach space), and there are many generalizations both in pure math and in mathematical physics. A keyword for the pure math side which is becoming increasing popular is Ore algebra and its special case, Weyl algebra. If anyone's interested, I can give citations.

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Chris Hillman

Read these PF posts. Avoid Wikipedia--- except for these versions. Read this and this suggested sticky. When asked for advice, I always say: never take advice!

Could it be that all light represents a macro effect of the Uncertainity Principle?

I found this on synchotron radiation:

An ultimate limit on the emittance arises from the uncertainty principle and a limit on the Beta

[This goes beyond my uncertainity principle and is a Noidea Principle, since I no not what it means, but it's somethin'.]

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

What if we include annihilation?

Is it possible to know the position and velocity of a single particle at the annihilation event? For example, if we supercool a pool of electrons and inject positrons of various temperatures into the test chamber, can we find out the position of annihilation and kinetic energy of the positron. We would setup the experiment to render the kinetic energy of the electrons as negligible.

Probably none, with a sufficient constraint on what "macro" means. But the uncertainty principle in the sense of ΔEΔt≥h/2π (where "E" is energy and "t" is time) sets the minimum possible width for a spectral emission or absorption feature, and is measurable in a spectroscopy lab. That might not be "macro" enough for you, but I felt like mentioning it to point out that the uncertainty principle is not just the usually cited ΔxΔp≥h/2π but in fact applies to any conjugate pair of quantum mechanical variables, which includes energy and time.

Chris beat me to the point. I have long been fascinated by the amazing coincidence between the behavior of the physical universe (which we assume to exist independently of ourselves) and the mathematical universe (which is an invention entirely of our own minds). That the latter should be so good at predicting the behavior of the former is astounding to me. And a good example of this is the totally unintuitive uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics. In fact it can be derived purely from mathematics with no input from physics, or any consideration of the physical world at all, yet the physical world obeys the purely mathematical constraint.

There is a derivation from Fourier Analysis here: Fourier Transforms and Uncertainty Relations (hosted by the ever useful