The uncertainty principle

This idea, developed by W Heisenberg is one of the most famous and popularized ideas in quantum physics. It is rather a good choice because it is a fascinating one and once understood it changes the way you appreciate the world around you. It tells us that there is a haziness in nature, that the ever changing dynamic of "things" are a limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles. At quantum scale, the most we can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where things are (their position) and how they will behave (their momentum) and the more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other. 

The uncertainty principle questions how we see and measure things in the everyday world. The painting you see are particles of light, photons, that have bounced off the screen or the canvas and reached your eyes. What you see is only what you see, it's a combination of some fuzziness that I created with what your senses perceive and what as you see you will interpret from it. Each particle bouncing from the canvas carries with it information about the surface it has bounced from, at the speed of light. The photon is a medium, what about the particles that create the painting? Observing a subatomic particle, such as an electron, is not so simple. You might similarly want to bounce a photon off it and hope to detect that photon with an instrument but chances are that the photon will impart some momentum to the electron as it hits it and change the path of the particle you are trying to measure. Or because quantum particles move so fast, the electron may no longer be in the place it was when the photon originally bounced off it. Either way, your observation of either position or momentum will be inaccurate and, more important, the act of observation affects the particles being observed.

That painting tells a lot about what my work tries to achieve, the fuzziness of nature, and the invisible force that our senses are trained to forget so that it's easy to live in a world where a table is just a table and it's always there, and where what we see as empty is just really empty. But hopefully, The uncertainty principle will give you a glimpse of what I see and how I perceive my environment, it'll give you an idea of the horizon colour when sun sets on the pasture and on the round old mountains, of how the clouds move in the sky, and of how peaceful our surroundings here are.