The more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other. The uncertainty principle says that we cannot measure the position (x) and the momentum (p) of a particle with absolute precision. In one of his regular letters to a colleague, Wolfgang Pauli, he presented the inklings of an idea that has since became a fundamental part of the quantum description of the world. In fleshing out this radical worldview, Heisenberg discovered a problem in the way that the basic physical properties of a particle in a quantum system could be measured. Among its many counter-intuitive ideas, quantum theory proposed that energy was not continuous but instead came in discrete packets (quanta) and that light could be described as both a wave and a stream of these Heisenberg was working through the implications of quantum theory, a strange new way of explaining how atoms behaved that had been developed by physicists, including Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, over the previous decade. The more familiar form of the equation came a few years later when he had further refined his thoughts in subsequent lectures and papers. An early incarnation of the uncertainty principle appeared in a 1927 paper by Heisenberg, a German physicist who was working at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen at the time, titled " On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics".
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