The Uncertainty Principle

In this seminar I will show that the presence of a gravitational field must necessarily change the form of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Several very different proposals have been put forward in previous literature, but there is a way to uniquely determine the form of the new uncertainty principle from the commutator algebra. The surprising result is that gravity and quantum mechanics tend to exclude each other: when gravity is strong, the quantum mechanical effects tend to disappear - a sort of “classicalisation”. This leads to a new principle of physics, what I call the gravity/QM complementarity. I shall give the audience some indications on the logical consequences of this complementarity, and its surprising connections to several other branches of physics. I will discuss a possible way to determine experimentally the reality of this effect via superposition/entanglement measurements.