no matter how sensitive your instruments, you can never know both the velocity and position of any subatomic particle, say an electron. There is always a quantum “fuzziness.”
To understand this, we have to understand the basis of the quantum theory, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This innocent sounding principle states that no matter how sensitive your instruments, you can never know both the velocity and position of any subatomic particle, say an electron. There is always a quantum “fuzziness.” Thus, a startling picture emerges. An electron is actually a collection of different states, with each state describing an electron in a different position with a different velocity. (Einstein hated this principle. He believed in “objective reality,” which is the commonsense notion that objects exist in definite, well-defined states and that you can determine the exact position and velocity of any particle.)
