The Quantum Veil of Ignorance: Fundamental Limits to our Knowledge about the Microscopic World

FRIAS Lunch Lecture 2018 "Ignorance - what we don't know"
The Quantum Veil of Ignorance: Fundamental Limits to our Knowledge about the Microscopic World

Classical mechanics offers a very tidy picture of the universe as a smoothly running machine where the motion of each element is completely predetermined from its initial position and velocity. On the contrary, the findings of quantum physics teach us that processes in the microscopic world are inherently random. Even worse, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, such basic properties as position and velocity cannot be known simultaneously. I will try to give an introduction of our apparently unavoidable ignorance of what is really going on in the realm of quantum physics.