# Heisenberg uncertainty principle in German [closed]

I have heard that uncertainty was not the actual translation for the word which Heisenberg had used to describe his original principle (in German). The translated meaning is a bit different. What was the actual German word which Heisenberg had used for 'uncertainty'?

• I’m voting to close this question because it should be moved to hsm.stackexchange.com Apr 18 '21 at 15:57

It is called the « Unschärferelation ». Some people prefer that to the english version because uncertainty makes you think that if you made better measurements, you wouldn’t get this uncertainty, which is not the case. In fact, it is better to think about it as relation between the dispersion of the momentums and the dispersion of the positions of a particle, which product has to be greater than $$\frac{\hbar}{2}$$. In other words it is all about the relation of the unsharpness of these two distributions. That’s why « unsharpness relation » seems two describe it better than « uncertainty principle ».