Werner Heisenberg was a giant of 20th-century physics. If you were collecting physicist trading cards, you’d want one of his.
If you took high school physics, you probably remember hearing about “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.” If not, here’s the simple version . . .
You can measure where a particle is or where it’s going, but not both.
Or, to put it in more generalized terms, you can either focus on something or where it’s going, but not both. And even then, you won’t know for sure.
Some of this is a measurement problem, but mostly, it’s a fundamental observation about reality. We want things to be solid, sure, and predictable. The “quantum” truth is nothing is.
Am I sitting right here writing this? Probably. The more time you spend trying to figure out if that’s true, the more likely it is I’ll be somewhere else.
When we accept things as they are, we take the other side of the Heisenberg offer. Instead of resenting, reacting to, and relitigating the moment and how we got here (the particle’s position), we are better served by paying attention to our momentum and what’s next.