Krdytkyu

up vote 34 down vote favorite 5 From what I know about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one of its consequences is that when you learn a great deal about the position of a particle, you greatly increase the uncertainty of the particle's momentum. This got me thinking about a super-accurate scanner that will measure the positions of all the particles in an object (for example a building) to an extremely high degree of certainty. This would cause the momentum of all of these particles to become extremely uncertain. I am not sure where the energy would come from for this, but if the numbers are extreme enough, most of the particles should have extremely high momentums in random directions, causing the object to be obliterated. Is my understating of the uncertainty principle horribly flawed, or does this have enough reasonabl