the principle points out to the inacuraccy in the measurement of the two quantitites of the particles(momentum and position) No. This is not correct

Measurements aren't involved at all. It's about the waves. The same problem was well known in classical waves - we might as well call it Fourier's Uncertainty Principle. The critical point is that indeed, matter is made of waves. If it was made from particles (the corpuscle theories), the effect would only exist as an artifact of measurement, and better measurement would give you less uncertainty. But for a wave packet, the (lowest possible) uncertainty is simply there - it has nothing to do with measurement. Musicians have to deal with it every day when e.g. tuning their instruments :)

Look at an animation like this: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Wavepacket1.gif This is analogous to how quanta work. What is the position and momentum of the wave packet?

@Luaan it has different momenta at different positions, so the whole wave packet doesn't possess a definite momentum?

-1: "I agree with the fact" - it's science, not religion.

its not inaccuracy - its mere IMPOSSIBLE to be absolutely certain about all properties of quantum particles - if you want to look "sharp" enough - your detection method already influences the particle ...

The uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to the amount of information the simulation we are running in can hold. Some of it is made up on the fly.

@Peter-ReinstateMonica The uncertainty principle tells us that we are in a simulation?

@Michael No, that's a given ;-). The uncertainty principle is the accuracy with which it is running. The outcomes which are not determined because the informational detail limit is reached are filled in with random. Like when you zoom into a signal beyond its resolution: It's all noise. There is simply nothing there.

@Peter-ReinstateMonica Have you got a source for that? I would have thought that a holographic simulated universe would exhibit self-similarity either through a loop or fractal in the recursive waveform.

@Michael That was surely considered ;-).

@Luaan "The same problem was well known in classical waves - we might as well call it Fourier's Uncertainty Principle. " Could you give more details please? Any website that has more explanation in simpler terms for the layman?

@SwaroopJoshi That's one way to look at it, as long as you understand that the actual values of position and momentum in the quantum field are not observable even in principle. All we can observe are the probability distributions. Sometimes those probability distributions are approximately factorizable, and it makes sense to talk about "individual particles"; much more often, you have a superposition that cannot be factorized, and you can only talk about things like "two electrons interacting" or "probability distribution flow". What's the position/momentum of a C note I play on a keyboard?

@Luaan I understand that it's not observable. So you're (most of them) telling that just because we can't observe the actual value, it doesn't have one?

@SwaroopJoshi A simpler way to look at the problem is that our intuition that the world is made out of particles is just wrong, full stop (assuming QFT etc. is correct enough). Don't try too hard trying to fit reality to your intuitions - we're machines built by evolution. Trying to find particles in reality is just confusing yourself - there's only quantum waves in quantum fields, and those follow some pretty specific rules. Sometimes, it is convenient to think of particular configurations as "individual particles", but as with all models, you must not take it too far.

@SwaroopJoshi "Observable" is a very specific technical term in quantum physics. It doesn't mean "measurable with the instruments we have". There's plenty of observables we can't measure.

@user13267 I was writing an answer that explains this, but it got way too complicated way too quickly. If you want to play around with it, think about the basic problem: a wave is a pattern that endlessly repeats itself (e.g. f(x) = sin(x)). How do you compose multiple waves to produce a "wave packet" (the same pattern repeating in finite time/space)? This is what happens every time you strum a guitar, for example. What's the frequency and length of the tone you play? What's the frequency if you mute the string almost immediately after?

I tried putting my cat in a box for half an hour and I have zero uncertainty about all these scratches on my arm, -1 would not follow Heisenberg pet advice again.

@eagle275 again, you're talking about being certain about the properties, or getting some knowledge about it, through some detection method. I don't care about knowing what the value is. I'm just interested in knowing whether it possesses an exact value of position/momentum or not, in reality. I understand that we disturb the particle by trying to detect it.

@Luaan I read that observables are operators that give an eigenvalue when acted on an eigenstate. Here, is the eigenvalue is the value of the position/momentum that we get, after the operator acts on it?