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Originally Posted by misskate  Oh dear, I think I missed something here that has to do with his name. Explain... |
In the show Breaking Bad the main character (Walter White) is a brilliant chemist who was responsible for winning a couple of colleagues a Nobel Prize and who is stuck in a soul crushing job teaching high school chemistry to a bunch of students who hate the subject while the company he helped create and then walked away from early on is now worth billions. He one day collapses at his second job washing cars and finds out he has advanced stage lung cancer. So he decides to team up with one of his old high school student to cook crystal meth so he can have some money to leave to his family. Because he is a Nobel level chemist he makes the purest meth on the planet.
When Walter starts having to get involved with the distribution of the meth he takes the street name Heisenberg, after the Nobel winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg who was one of the main contributors to the development of quantum mechanics. Werner Heisenberg is most famous for the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which says you cannot measure the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously with arbitrarily high precision. Essentially, taking a measurement of one changes the value of the other. In other words you can't know where something is and where it's going with arbitrary precision. I know there has to be some metaphor bound in there with the Heisenberg character in Breaking Bad, but I'm not sure beyond maybe the name indicating how unstable Walter White is as he devolves into Heisenberg, how he can be going anywhere next.
A way to describe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle on an intuitive level is that if I want to measure the position of say a particle, I have to hit it with some light or touch it with a ruler, or something that's going to transfer momentum to it. No big deal if I'm hitting a tennis ball with light, a tennis ball is pretty massive and the light won't transfer enough momentum to it to affect its motion by any perceivable amount. But if I shine light at something tiny like an electron that momentum it gains from the light will completely change the electron's momentum since the electron has a tiny mass.
On a more technical level you can think of every particle in the universe being described by what's called a wavefunction, which is a complex function over space and time (complex like complex numbers such as 2+3i, where i^2 = -1). If you have a wavefunction f representing your particle, take a small volume dV of space at some fixed time t, and you take the square |f|^2 of the absolute value of the wavefunction f at that point in space where you took the volume dV, then you get a probability measure |f|^2 dV which tells the probability of you finding the particle inside that volume dV when taking a measurement. Normally the wavefunction is made of what's called a superposition of eigenstates. Think of it like when you listen to music. When someone strums his guitar string you don't get a single frequency of sound from it; you get a bunch of different harmonics that combine into that characteristic sound of a guitar. The music you hear from that plucked string is a superposition (e.g. a weighted sum) of the various harmonics. Same with the wavefunction. Any measurement you do collapses that wavefunction from a superposition of eigenstates (just think of them as like harmonics in sound) into a single eigenstate (or like a single harmonic), with the measured value being what's called an eigenvalue. Eg when I measure where an electron is, the electron is no longer in a superposition of states at various different places, it is in the 100% certain state of being in the spot where I found it to be when taking the measurement (it goes back to being a superposition again very quickly after the measurement).