How do we know the idea that particles don’t exist in one definitive spot until we measure them, isn’t just our lack of knowledge due to not measuring them yet?
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This is a misunderstanding. Particles have positions, and we can measure them accurately. Particles are constantly moving around though, and there’s a limit to how accurately we can measure both their position and how they’re moving at the same. We can measure one or the other accurate, but not both at the same time.
When things are REALLY tiny, they behave more like waves than marbles. So, imagine the particle as a ripple on a pond instead of a marble. You look at the pond and see lots of peaks and troughs in the ripples. If you want to measure the speed of the wave, you look at a single spot and count the ripples as they pass the spot, but if you count how fast the ripples move you can’t tell the height of all the waves in the ripple if you only look in one spot. You could take a snapshot of all the waves and figure out their heights at that exact moment, but you’d not be able to tell how fast they’re moving because it’s not a movie.
It turns out when you are looking at something so small that it behaves more like a wave than a marble, there’s the more you focus on measuring one property (position, or movement) at a specific time, the less accurately you measure the other. A guy name Heisenberg actually worked this out based purely on math from a bunch of physics experiments that were trying to describe the movements of electrons in atoms.
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