A QUESITON OR 2

first: heisenberg's uncertainty principal.. the way it was always explained to me in school is that you can't ever be certain of an electron's(or whatever particle) position and momentum at the same time, because any interaction with the particle will skew your results.. but doesn't this only apply for current technology? if, say, you had some passive method of measuring these values, like an incredibly accurate method of measuring gravitational pull, such that you could accurately measure the exact position of the particle, and determine momentum by the rate of change of the position, why wouldn't that work? I'm sure there's a very good reason, but the wiki page on the uncertainty principal is hueg, so i'll just ask here..

my second question is somewhat along the same line of reasoning: to the best of my understanding, the universe isn't completely set it its ways, with chaos and entropy changing a system at the subatomic level randomly. the real question is, IS there any randomness to the universe, or are our currently understood laws of physics just inadequate to explain the true nature of the universe? If string theory, or whatever other theory might eventually crop up in the future, turns out to be right, and can precisely explain the behavior of the universe, there are some pretty huge implications for things like predestination free choice and whatnot..

just wondering

Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of particles and is independent of our technology.

Considering that the brain almost certainly doesn't rely on quantum effects, there are already "huge" implications for things like free will.

could 'uncertainty' be a function of our limited understanding of quantum laws?

another way of looking at it i suppose, is this hypothetical situation: if you could make an exact copy of the universe at a given point, down to the momentum and position of every particle (hurr) discovered and explained by today's understanding of the laws of the universe or not, and let it 'run' for a while, would it exactly duplicate what our universe did?

1)No matter how accurate your measuring system is, the postulates of Quantum Mechanics imply that the standard deviations of measurements of, say, position and momentum, will forever be greater than or equal to a particular lower bound. So basically what >>2 said.

2) I've not heard that either chaos theory or entropy imply randomness in the universe, at the best you have an appearance of randomness. You'd be better off firing at QM again, where the eigenfunction decomposition of a wave implies there is only a probability a certain value of some property (e.g. velocity) is measured. This is still not random though, the wave evolves strictly according to Schrodinger, rather than randomly taking on any value again, after the wave-state has collapsed.

>>1

The uncertainty principle arises because the operators for position and momentum don't commute.