rickman wrote in :

That is an assumption. There are many aspects of QM that simply don't
have an underlying reason. At least when they do the math it simply
says this will happen without an explanation. QM is full of that sort
of thing. Classical mechanics has fewer things that aren't based in
deduction.


CM and QM have more in common than I was led to beleive at first, especially
when it comes to direct observations. My first reading told me that position
and momentum (as well as time and energy) were two mutually exclusive
proprties, one being known while the other could not be known. The
'Heisenberg Uncertaintainty Principle (though I think there was a Pauli's
Exclusion Principle somewhere too, but I can't remember being told much about
that one, Heisenberg (and Bohr) were the big names in anything I read.

Anyway, I ended up with some thought experiment. (Good enough for
Schroedinger, good enough for me...) I imagined a dancer leaping across a
stage. I imagines a photographer adjusting the exposure time of a camera to
capture each moment, trying to get the best out of the uncertain light and
timing. I decided that as an aggredate of particles, the dancer, and the
film, and the passing photons, should still show something of the QM
behaviour, very directly, straight to out human perception. If it were not
so, how could we make ANY observations to prove any theory?!

I realised that a logn exposure would blur the image, giving big clues as to
the momentum of the ebent but blurring the position, and conversely a short
exposure can get precise position and leave a great deal of uncertainty about
momentum, for example motion of an arm relative th the rest of the dander's
body.

Some years later the things I read about QM started saying this too! That the
degree of informational accuracy about one property WAS on a continuum of
certainty, just as in CM observations. This did not surprise me, but it did
please me better than the older notion of absolute 'focus' on one or the
other. Perhaps books for laymen just got better written, I don't know...

This went further though. I also decided that after examining the photo at
length, and considering other contexts after the event, both position AND
momentum could be known with precision.

I'll admit to being surprised when that too was recently stated by scientists
to be the case for QM too, as well as CM. it is now recognised that AT THE
TIME OF THE EVENT, the uncertainty priciple applies, but there is what I call
a temporal bandwidth that applies, outside of which more certainty is had
about both properties.

My current thought is that eventually QM, having belped build the tools that
see where Bohr said we could not see, will also show us a great deal about
our perception of time, and therefore time itself.