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Electrons. You've seen the model of the atom, right? Cluster of balls in the middle (protons and neutrons) and the electrons are little balls that whizz around like little planets around a Sun?
That model is a simplification of the truth. It turns out that it is impossible to pin down where an electron is and also know what it is doing. And if you know what it's doing (you can see its effects), you'll have no idea where it is.
Where they are has to be measured by probability. "It's bound to this nucleus / taking part in a chemical bond so it's likely to be in this vicinity", is about as close as you can get.
There is literally nothing excluding that electron from temporarily being a billion miles away. That's astronomically unlikely, but it's not impossible.
And by some measurement methods, when you do try to pinpoint where the electron is, it can appear to be in multiple places at once.
This can be interpreted as bleed-through from nearby quantum realms, maybe even other universes, where the electron is in one place per nearby universe. One of those places is ours, but we cannot tell which. And by the time we've made any kind of determination, the electron has moved. They never stop.
Photons - particles of light - also do this. All subatomic particles do this.
The more subatomic particles you have in some combined state (as an atomic nucleus, or even a molecule), the lower the probability is that that bound state can be in multiple places at once, but again, it is not ruled out.
But it does mean that the more bound particles an object is made from, the more definite its position appears to be, which is what we're used to at our human-sized scale.
I'm trying to follow, how can an electron be a billion miles away? Aren't the attractive forces keeping the atom together?
In quantum physics the position of an electron is defined by a wave function. This wave function or rather it's square modulus is the probability distribution of the position of the electron. In more simple terms, the electron doesn't have a precise position but rather a high probability to be somewhere.
One example of an electron being able to be billion miles away is the following: Think of a probability in the shape of a bell. Where the center of the bell has a value between 0 and 1 and to each side the function tends to 0. The likeliest region for the electron to be is the center of the bell, but since the function never takes the value 0, it is not impossible for the electron to be a billion miles away.
If you apply a force to the electron, like an electrical field, you will simply shift and modulate the probability distribution moving the maximum probability towards the positive side of the electrical field. But the electron being in the place you expect it to be is still nothing but a very likely event. The event of the electron being a billion miles away is still of probability not 0.
Draw a graph by flipping a coin. Start at (0,0). Assume a fair coin and fair flips. Move one unit right each time, but go up (+1) for heads and down (-1) for tails. The line drawn can go arbitrarily far vertically from 0, but the average vertical position necessarily remains 0.
The average position of an electron is slightly more nebulous than the line x=0, and depends on what, if anything, the electron bound to, but for each state an electron can be in there is a group, or a locus, of possible positions that represent that bound state and the whole locus is a mean of sorts. An electron can go on a journey wherever as long as it continues to regress to that locus.
And in the exceptionally rare instance where a subatomic particle goes on an indefinite journey, we call that quantum tunnelling.
Quantum tunneling is actually a problem in integrated circuit design: https://medium.com/@markveerasingam/quantum-tunneling-the-semiconductors-struggle-in-the-miniaturization-race-7ef2df8f9e48
I heard about that too. Its absolutely mind blowing when you realise, that we are able to build chips on such a small scale (and not just for special chips but for relatively common chips), that we are dipping into the realm of quantum physics causing all sorts of problems.