But can we trust the maths? This theoretically derived behaviour predicted by the mathematics of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has been confirmed in experiment. In a paper published in 1969, American physicist Clifford Shull describes the results of firing neutrons at slits of decreasing width. The increased knowledge of the location of the neutrons given by a narrower slit resulted, as theory predicted, in a greater spread of possible values for the momentum. And when the neutrons arrived at the detector plate, they were spread in a distribution whose standard deviation corresponded
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