Andrew Malag, Scylla and Charybdis 2, 2024

oil on panel, 95 cm x 100 cm

Indeterminacy is a concept, a physical law. It seems that one can try to illustrate some quantum phenomena directly resulting from the indeterminacy principle. For example, the so-called quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. In classical mechanics, the vacuum is a state in which nothing exists and nothing happens. Such a situation is unacceptable on the grounds of quantum mechanics, precisely because of the principle of indeterminacy. This led to the concept of quantum fluctuations: for very short periods of time, particle-antiparticle pairs are created and after this short fluctuation the pair annihilates. The energy taken from the vacuum for creation, after a while, is given back, so that the average energy (the classical one) is always zero. The higher the energy of a pair of particles is borrowed, the faster it has to be given back - high-energy particles live shorter, not the other way around, because then low-energy pairs of particles living a short time would lead in the limit to this classical "stationarity", which is "forbidden" by the indetermination principle.