Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.

ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration

for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools

for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can

use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com

slash UK slash AI for people. I'm Christy Ashwondon, and this is Uncertain,

a scientific American podcast about the uncertainty that drives and occasionally mucks up scientific discovery.

This is episode four of our five-part series, and it occurs to me that we still haven't even mentioned the thing that most people immediately think of when it comes to science and uncertainty.

So I'm going to rectify that right now.

Chanda Prescott Weinstein, I'm an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in

women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Can you explain Heisenberg's

uncertainty principle? The fundamental idea behind Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that there is a limit

on how well we can simultaneously measure the position of an object, so where something is,

and its momentum, which we can roughly say is in some sense a measure of its velocity,

so how fast it's going in what direction. There's also a mass in there, but we don't need to worry

about that.

And there's actually also another uncertainty relation between energy and time about how well you can simultaneously measure the energy of an object and the time over which the system is

changing. I remember learning about this in high school and just

feeling my head spin. Help me out here. So one of the early realizations among the quantum

theorists was this idea of wave particle duality, that everything can be a particle and a wave

simultaneously. It's a wave. It and a wave. I'm simultaneously.

Yeah, that's the part that really made me go, what?

...