Absolutely Small

3

Some Things About Waves

TO ADDRESS THE NATURE of the inherent disturbance that accompanies a measurement and to understand what can and cannot be measured about an absolutely small quantum mechanical system, first it is necessary to spend some time discussing classical waves and the classical description of light. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a variety of experiments produced results that could not be explained with classical mechanics. The earliest of these involved light. Therefore, we will first discuss an experiment that seemed to show that classical ideas work perfectly. Then, in Chapter 4, we will present one of the experiments that demonstrated that the classical mechanics description could not be correct and, furthermore, ...