ABSTRACT
Dual Nature of Light: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle In 1803 Thomas Young, an English physician and early researcher in physics, demonstrated that light travels in waves of specific frequency and length. This had important consequences for it
showed that light seemed to have characteristics of both particles and waves. This apparent contradiction was not resolved until the development of quantum theory in the early decades of the twentieth century. It proposes a dual nature for both waves and particles, with one aspect predominating in some situations and the other predominating in other situations. This is explained in Werner Heisenberg’s paper “The Uncertainty Principle” (1927) that places an absolute theoretical limit on the accuracy of certain measurements.1 The result is that the assumption by earlier scientists that the physical state of a system could be exactly measured and used to predict future states had to be abandoned. These lessons were reflected in new multifaceted ways of visualizing the world as seen by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and David Hockney.
