For if the fundamental insight of quantum mechanics is that one must choose to measure position or momentum first, and what one chooses affects what one will come up with when one measures the next value, this necessarily leads to a fundamental limit on the amount of information we can have about the world. As we drill down into the most basic presumption of Newton’s classical world—namely, that knowing everything about a particle’s position and momentum and the forces acting on it means knowing its past and future—we run into an impenetrable barrier. Perfect precision in our knowledge of the
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