Heisenberg's Pendulum

2022​​

For centuries, the comforting tick of pendulum-driven clocks has predictably and accurately measured time with Newtonian certainty. Predicting the swing of a pendulum is a reliable staple of high-school physics labs everywhere.

Physicists offered a world of predictability without limit, if given sufficient information. Then, in 1927, Werner Heisenberg came along.

 

Heisenberg showed us limits to what is knowable about physical reality, at least in the tiny world of quantum mechanics. According to his Uncertainty Principle, the more accurately one finds the position of a particle, the less one can possibly know about its momentum, and vice-versa.

 

Fortunately for us, Heisenberg’s formula includes Plank’s constant (h), which is a tiny number indeed. It matters for the subatomic world, but hardly ever at our human scale.This sculpture imagines a pendulum for which Plank’s constant has somehow been increased by about 34 orders of magnitude (Art can do what physics can’t!). The pendulum bob’s position becomes a blur of possibilities as momentum carries it through its swing.

 

Way back up in our comfortable world of the macroscopic, pendulum clocks still serenely and predictably tick away the hours. With a glance at his pendulum clock, Heisenberg need not be uncertain about lunchtime.