Michael, I’m afraid your correction of my post is wrong and my original was right (nyah, nyah!) but there is a very interesting slant to all of this so the clarification is worthwhile. The more we knock this backwards and forwards the clearer it’s becoming (to me anyway!). Let me deal with the meaning of the Uncertainty Principle first by quoting Wikipedia’s admirably lucid reference article: “The uncertainty principle is sometimes erroneously explained by claiming that the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle’s momentum. Heisenberg himself offered this explanation initially. Disturbance plays no part, however, since the principle even applies if position is measured in one copy of the system and momentum is measured in another, identical one. It is more accurate to say that the particle is a wave, not a point-like object, and does not have a well-defined simultaneous position and momentum.” Having said that, I sowed the seeds of contradiction when, in my original post, I referred to creating “fields of uncertainty”. What I should have said was “creating fields of superposition” but it doesn’t have quite the same ring. But let’s not lose sight of the key issues here: * Can we “artificially” increase the number of superpositioned states? * What effect does this have? * What causes the many possible states to reduce to one (“collapsing the wave function”)? * Can we do this by an act of will? Now in my last blog I jumped to the notion of instantaneous non-local action as being like magic. This is not particularly original nor did I explain the jump. But, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, this article by a New York Times writer concerning a relatively (ha!) recent experiment is well worth reading. It is quite long but stick with it: it highlights many of the (for scientists) disturbing issues that quantum physics throws up. The thing I particularly liked in this article was the concept of interferometers. I can think of a good many uses for them at our office.