So given how for example we can’t know an electron’s position and velocity at the same time and other small scale observations and measurements involve uncertainty and randomness. Is there any solid proof that we’re not just wrong? I know all science is inherently possibly wrong and is a model of best fit but this part of science in particular seems so arbitrary to actually be a good model.
In: 1
A good example of this is the [double slit experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment). We’ll make a wall, cut two slits in it, shoot things through the slits, and look at where they end up on the other side. If you shoot BB’s, it’s obvious – you get a pile of BB’s behind the first slit, and a pile of BB’s behind the second slit. If you do this with waves, though, something different happens – the waves go through both slits, and the pattern on the back is big where the waves add together, and small where the waves cancel out.
So now, send not a BB, but an electron through. Do this a bunch of times so you can build up the pattern, but only ever send one electron at a time. Now what happens? You get the wave pattern, not the BB pattern. The only way that can happen is if somehow the electron went through both slits at the same time. You can’t think of it as “well, the electron went through one or the other slits, I just don’t know which one it was”, because then you’d end up with the BB distribution. If you say “well, I’m going to watch very carefully what happens, so I can tell which slit the electron went through”, you indeed see the electron go through one or the other. But when you do that, the wave pattern goes away, and you’re back to the BB pattern. That’s what we’re talking about with uncertainty, it’s not that something has a definite position but we don’t know it. Instead, quantum things are really truly spread out over a finite size. We call this uncertainty because if I go and force a particle to give me an exact position, it will (at the price of giving up information about its velocity), but it didn’t have that exact position until I forced it (the technical term is “collapsing the wavefunction”)
Latest Answers