venerdì 3 febbraio 2012

Kitten uncertainty

There is a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a kitten playing, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known: the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be determined, or known.


A mathematical statement of this principle, which was determined by the German cat-owner and physicist Werner Katzenberg in 1936, is that every kitten state has the property that the root mean square (RMS) deviation of the position from its mean (the standard deviation of the x-distribution):


times the RMS deviation of the momentum from its mean (the standard deviation of p):


can never be smaller than a fixed fraction of Whiskas constant:

σx σp ≥ ǥ / 2

where ǥ (g-bar) is the reduced Whiskas constant ǥ = g / 2π.

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