Quantum tunnelling telescope on Southwold Pier

I really loved this cheeky art installation at the end of Southwold Pier. In reality, it's an ordinary telescope with a sound commentary and film clips overlaid onto the view. But quantum tunnelling - that's one of the weirdest things there is. It uses Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This says that you cannot know accurately the position and the speed (momentum, really) of a particle. The more accurately you know one, the less accurate the other becomes. Imagine an electron is going round a circuit and reaches a barrier - a gap in the circuit. This is often told as you walking along and reaching a really tall wall. You don't have the energy to climb the wall. The more accurately we measure your speed, the accurately we know your position. If that blurring of position includes places on the other side of the wall, there is then a finite probability that you are actually on the other side of the wall. Oh, there you are! You have used quantum phenomena to appear on the other side of the wall as if you tunnelled through. Electrons can really do this. This barrier has to be really, really thin if it is to work. Proper explanations talk about the attenuation of the probability function going through the wall.