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Comment by irjustin

3 months ago

Knowability directly means "ability to know" meaning whether you are even able to know it at all i.e. you can/can't ever know it.

The Heisenberg uncertainty means you can't know it (i.e. it's not a value/property exists to extract), regardless if you try to measure it.

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irjustin

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Khaine  3 months ago

I took knowability to be, how well you know the properties of a particle? For example, if you could perfectly knew the position of a particle, then you would have no knowledge of its momentum.

I thought Hisenberg meant the more you knew about one property (i.e. the smaller the bound on the position of a particle) the less you knew about the other property.

I'm not an expert on this, so more than happy to be corrected.

  • irjustin  3 months ago

    > I took knowability to be, how well you know the properties of a particle?

    No, I'm using the literal definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/knowability

    > I thought Hisenberg meant the more you knew about one property (i.e. the smaller the bound on the position of a particle) the less you knew about the other property.

    Yes, this is it, but remove "you knew"... just - property. The more one property is defined, the less the other property is.

    The key I'm trying to get across is it doesn't matter what you, the observer know/don't know (i.e. measure). As temp ->abs_zero, momentum becomes more-undefined/fuzzier. Nothing to do with you measuring.

    The "other" property is fundamentally undefined (i.e. not knowable, i.e. able to be known).

    Maybe we're getting hung up on our shared understanding of "knowable" and I shouldn't have used it, but it is, technically, the correct usage.

  • jagged-chisel  3 months ago

    irjustin is either redefining words to suit their purpose, or isn’t articulating their point well.

    To even “know” position, one must measure it. Because electrons are always in motion, if you want to know their speed perfectly, you won’t know their position precisely. You’ll have a probability of where the electron should be, but no definite position.

    That’s all Heisenberg has to say. It doesn’t talk about your observations changing the thing you observed, it doesn’t “cause” anything to happen, it is not dependent on the consciousness of the observer and doesn’t make effects itself.