Born to do Math 32 – Louis de Broglie
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/08
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Rick Rosner: In the 1920s, Louis de Broglie found that everything has a wavelength, which is an uncertainty in space that is inversely proportional to its mass. So it is like an exercise in a beginning physics class to calculate the wavelength of a baseball or the uncertainty in space of a baseball because a baseball has like – I dunno – 10^29th atoms or something. I forget. Anyway, its uncertainty in space is super tiny – to the point where you’ll never, ever, have to worry – in practical terms – about the uncertainty in space of any macroscopic object.
We are able to walk through the world barely ever experiencing the deep spatial uncertainty of positions of objects in space. I mean, we can make errors ourselves about where things are, but the universe itself is not entirely sure where things are, never comes into play, or almost never. Almost every aspect of the world in which we live has that tiny uncertainty that is so small that we are never aware of it.
We can use numbers, which are perfectly exact to represent things. That you look at the newspaper and you see a house with a 3-car garage. There are tiny uncertainties in everything that you are looking at, whether a house is a house or a garage is a garage or that set of 3 garages is really 3. You can imagine ridiculous situations in which that comes into question, but in reality houses are really houses and our ideas of houses conform to houses and garages to garages.
Weird variations of that never come into play. So we’re able to use precise shortcuts in a world that is not perfectly precise, but is precise enough for our purposes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I like that.
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