Heisenberg Principle of Developer Productivity

Going beyond coding activity to focus on business outcomes

I fell in love with physics watching The Black Hole. It was not the greatest movie, but I was just a young kid and was thoroughly hooked. I became obsessed with how such a thing as a black hole could exist in the universe and started reading every book on the subject.

My dive into physics took me on a wild ride to the quantum side that still mystifies me today. There was the spooky science that Einstein scoffed at, thought experiments like Schrodinger’s Cat, and my favorite mind twister, the Uncertainty Principle.

While I am oversimplifying, German physicist Werner Heisenberg stated that you cannot know both the position and velocity of an object at the same time. This is because of the duality of matter which exhibits properties of a wave and particle. From our perspective, we never notice this duality. At the atomic level however, it’s a very different story where we only operate in the realm of probabilities.

The more well-known consequence of the Uncertainty Principle is that of measurement. Even the effect of measuring objects at the atomic scale causes enough disturbance that capturing one measurement makes the other impossible to pin down.