Letters to the Editor
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@Dirgio (Uncertainty Principle)
Let us suppose that you are the batter in a baseball game. The pitch comes, and your job is to track the ball: determine exactly where it is and where it is going before it gets to you so that you can hit it. You do not do your job perfectly in general, and your are likely to say "This is not easy, I am not good enough to do this perfectly." You are not likely to say (and would be incorrect if you said) "The universe will not let me do my job."
However, if you tried to track really small things, you would find through careful experimentation and analysis that the universe really is the problem in this case. There are limitations to how accurately you can know simultaneously where something is and where it is going. Here are two extreme views of this situation:
1. Everything does have a precise location and speed, even on a very small scale. But we cannot communicate the information accurately.
2. Simultaneous knowledge of position and velocity is a concept we have because it is so close to correct on our natural scale of things that it works essentially perfectly for baseball. But the concept need have no meaning outside its realm of verified applicability, and it is up to us to figure out how the world really works.
View 1 is dead wrong; it took a few decades to really show this, but that question was settled some time ago. View 2 is reasonable for most things. But I would hesitate to say it is perfectly true. Physics does not really provide us with mental pictures of how things work; it allows us to predict the results of observations.
There is a lot more that could be said, but this is enough for now.