A team of physicists say they have found a way to sidestep Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, one of the more troublesome and irritating rules of our universe.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for the uninitiated, states that it is not possible to exactly measure or calculate both the position and momentum of an object at the same time. 

With macroscopic objects, for example a basketball or Danny DeVito, the principle doesn't matter too much. For example, you could measure Danny DeVito's position using light, and know that the light you used hasn't pushed him hard enough for you to be uncertain about his momentum. But in the quantum realm, it becomes a real problem.

Before we measure an electron's position, its wavefunction is spread out over an area, giving us probabilities about where the electron will be found. Hit an electron with light to measure its position, and its momentum increases, shrinking its wave function and localizing it around its position. But with that, you lose information about the electron's momentum as you impart energy into the electron, altering it. The more precise you want to be about one property, the less you know of the other. The more you know of the object's position, the less you know about its speed and mass, and vice versa. 

This principle is as tested as it is frustrating, and has held up nearly a century after its discovery by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. But a team of physicists from the UK and Australia say that with a few clever little tradeoffs, it is possible to sidestep the principle and gain precision about both properties at a level better than the "standard quantum limit".