Atom 1. The Clash of Titans (26 of 30)

Atom

Almost all of the scientific community was against them.
They felt isolated, desperate.
Their backs were against the wall.
Despite this, they stubbornly refused to give up their controversial theory.
This attic room was Heisenberg's study back in 1926.
Bohr would come up here night after night where he and Heisenberg would argue about the meaning of quantum mechanics.
They would argue so passionately, that on one occasion Heisenberg was reduced to tears.

And then, as Heisenberg stared out of his attic window in despair at the park below, an extraordinary thought occurred to him.
It struck him why an atom can't be visualised, why it can't be understood intuitively.
It 's not just because it's tiny, tricky and difficult.
It 's because it's inherently unknowable.
He realised that there was a fundamental limit to how much we can know about the sub-atomic world.
For instance, if we know where an electron is at a particular moment in time, then we cannot know how fast it's moving.
But if we knew its speed, we wouldn't know its position.
This ambiguity isn't a shortcoming in the theory itself.
Nor is it due to the clumsiness of the way we carry out our measurements, but a fundamental truth about the way Nature behaves at the sub-atomic scale.
It became known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
And it's probably the most profound, incredible, yet unsettling concepts in the whole of science.
What Heisenberg had uncovered through his abstract matrix mechanics was a deep and shocking truth about the atomic world.