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  • Quantum mechanics is weird, right? But did you know that some of its supposed peculiarities

  • are not unique to quantum physics but are just properties of waves in general?

  • Take the uncertainty principle - it says that the better we know where a particle is, the

  • less we know about how fast it's going. There's a limit to how much we can know! But this

  • isn't just quantum weirdness - it happens all the time with normal everyday waves!

  • Remember that the frequency of a wave is how close the wave crests are to each other - a

  • low frequency wave doesn't have nearly as much oomph as a high frequency one!

  • And the position of a wave iswell, where the wave ismostly. So where exactly is

  • a wave? It's spread out everywhere, right? Ok, but for a wave pulse it's pretty easy

  • to see where the wave is. So now that we know where the pulse is, what's it's frequency?

  • Well, a localized pulse doesn't really "wave", so we can't measure the frequency of its crests!

  • And that's the uncertainty principle in a nutshell - you can either know where a wave

  • is or where it's going, but not both at the same time!

Quantum mechanics is weird, right? But did you know that some of its supposed peculiarities

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