The math is a way of describing things that happen in the real world. You might imagine that it would be easy to get both the exact position of something and its exact mass, path, and speed at the same time. However, in reality you have to do two things to get your answer. If you are measuring the position and momentum of a bullet that is stuck in a cliff of a great mountain somewhere, it is a simple matter. The mountain does not appear to be going anywhere, and neither is the bullet. So its position is known and its velocity is 0, so its momentum is also 0. But if the bullet is somewhere between a gun and a target, it will be difficult to get its position at any given time. The best we may be able to do is to take its picture using a camera with a very fast shutter. But a single squeeze of the shutter would give you only one thing, the bullet's position at time t. To get the momentum we might put a block of paraffin in the bullet's way and measure how the block of paraffin moved when it stopped the bullet. Or, if we knew the bullet's mass, we might take a sequence of two pictures, compute the velocity by knowing the difference between the two positions of the bullet and the time between its two appearances. However we do it, we need to measure mass and position and time between appearances. We end up making at least two measurements to get to x and p. In that case we have to choose which measurement to make first, and which to make second. It seems to make no difference which order our measurements are made in. Measuring the bullet's mass and then measuring its positions twice, or measuring the bullet's positions twice and then recovering the bullet and measuring its mass would not make any difference, would it? After all, we have not done anything to the bullet when we weigh it or when we make photographs of it.
On the very small scale when we are measuring something like an electron, however, each measurement does something to it. If we measure position first, then we change its momemtum in the process. If we measure the electron's momentum first, then we change its position in the process. Our hope would be to measure one of them and then measure the other before anything changed, but our measuring itself makes a change, and the best we can hope to do is to reduce to a minimum the energy we contribute to the electron by measuring it. That minimum amount of energy has the Planck constant as one of its factors.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was found in the earliest equations of the "new" quantum physics, and the theory was given by using matrix math. However, the uncertainty principle is a fact about nature, and it shows up in other ways of talking about quantum physics such as the equations made by Erwin Schrödinger.
There have been two very different ways of looking at what Heisenberg discovered: Some people think that things that happen in nature are "determinate," that is, things happen by a definite rule and if we could know everything we need to know we could always say what will happen next. Other people think that things that happen in nature are guided only by probability, and we can know only how things will behave on the average—but we know that very precisely.
The physicist John Stewart Bell discovered a way to prove that the first way cannot be correct. His work is called Bell's theorem or Bell's Inequality.
The expression "quantum leap" or "quantum jump" has been taken to mean some great and transformative change, and it is often used in hyperbolic expressions by politicians and mass media sales campaigns. In quantum mechanics it is used to describe the transition of an electron from one orbit around the nucleus of an atom to any other orbit, higher or lower.
Sometimes the word "quantum" is used in the names of commercial products and businesses. For instance, Briggs and Stratton manufactures many kinds of small gasoline motors for lawn mowers, rotary tillers, and other such small machines. One of their model names is "Quantum."
Because the uncertainty principle tells us that certain measurements at the atomic level cannot be made without disturbing other measurements, some individuals use this idea to describe instances in the human world where the activity of an observer changes the thing that is being watched. An anthropologist may go to some far away place to learn how people live there, but the fact that a strange person from the outside world is there watching them may change the ways that those people act.
Things that people do while observing things that change what is being observed are cases of the Observer effect. Some things that people do cause changes on the very small level of atoms and are cases of uncertainty or indeterminacy as first described by Heisenberg. The uncertainty principle shows that there is always a limit to how small we can make certain pairs of measurements such as position and speed or trajectory and momentum. The observer effect says that sometimes what people do in observing things, e.g., learning about an ant colony by digging it up with garden tools, can have big effects that change what they were trying to learn about.
Anthony Henday
Anthony Henday (fl. 1750 – 1762) was one of the first white men to explore the interior of the Canadian northwest. His explorations were for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) who were worried that La Vérendrye and the other western commanders were taking furs from the northwest to their forts.
Henday volunteered to undertake an expedition into this territory. He came from the Isle of Wight, and was a convicted smuggler and joined the HBC in 1750 as a net-maker and labourer. Henday had gained some experience in inland travel after arriving at York Factory. On June 26, 1754, he set out with a group of Plains Indians. They passed the French Fort Paskoya where he may have met La Corne, the western commander at that time.
In October of 1754 he and his group came to what is now Alberta from York Factory with a mission to meet the Blackfoot and perhaps trade with them. The Blackfoot did not give a clear answer, but Henday decided they meant “no”, so he travelled back to York Factory with news that he had explored the area and had met with the Blackfoot. Since the answer had been unsure, there was no more expeditions to Alberta.
This trip, and later ones, took Henday across much of the prairies of what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta and his journal shows that he brought a lot of trade to York Factory. Records show that some of the trade also went to the French at Fort Saint-Louis (Fort de la Corne) and Fort Paskoya which were on the route to Hudson Bay. He left the service of the HBC in 1762 largely because his efforts for the company, at least in his estimation, had not been properly recognized.
Anthony Henday Drive, a large ring road in Edmonton is named in his honour.
Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Hollywood Studios is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida, United States. Its theme is show business, based on Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. It was the third park built at the resort. It opened on May 1, 1989, as Disney-MGM Studios.
In 2009, the park had around 9.7 million guests, ranking it the fourth-most visited amusement park in the United States, and seventh-most visited in the world.
The park symbol is The Sorcerer's Hat, which is based on the magical hat from "Fantasia;" it replaced the Earful Tower as the park's icon in 2001 but now both have been removed.