In a lab in Boulder, Colorado, physicist Daniel Slichter plays an excruciatingly tiny version of pinball—with an individual atom as the ball. He and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have built a chip about the size of a grain of rice, which they keep in a small freezer at around −430 degrees Fahrenheit. The chip, a square of gold-coated sapphire with metal wires bonded to it, holds a single magnesium ion. Confined by an electric force field, the ion hovers 30 microns above the surface of the chip. Outside the freezer, Slichter’s team hits keys and turns knobs to bat the ion around with electric pulses.

Their game, though, is simpler than pinball. All they want to do is locate the ion—to watch the motion of the ball as it jiggles back and forth on the chip.

It’s much more challenging than it sounds. Slichter is working with an object many thousands of times smaller than a bacterium. His team wants to pin down the location of the moving ion to less than a nanometer, a fraction of the ion’s own diameter. At this level of precision, they inevitably brush against one of nature’s unbreakable rules: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

The uncertainty principle basically says that you cannot measure or describe an object with absolute precision. This imprecision is no fault of the scientist or measurement device. Nature has innate mystery; its smallest building blocks simply are fuzzy and diffuse objects. “The uncertainty principle means that you can’t know everything about a certain system at any given time,” says Slichter.

The principle doesn’t matter much in everyday life, because no one needs to bake a cake or even build a car with atomic precision. But it’s a big deal for scientists like Slichter who work on the quantum scale. They want to study particles such as electrons, atoms, and molecules, which often entails cooling them to temperatures near absolute zero so they slow down to a more manageable speed. But nature dooms these scientists, always, to a level of imprecision.

So Slichter can never know his magnesium ion fully. At any particular moment, if he measures one property of the ion well, it comes at the cost of studying some other aspect of the ion. To him, the uncertainty principle is like a mandatory tax you have to pay to nature. “I think of it as ‘There’s no free lunch,’” says Slichter. For example, if he controls the ion’s speed precisely, the particle will actually spread out so that it’s harder for him to pinpoint its position.

But he can try to game the system. In a paper published today in Science, his team describes how to skirt the uncertainty principle to better measure the ion’s position. Their method achieves 50 times more precision than the previous best techniques, which also means that they can make measurements 50 times faster than before. Now they can narrow down the particle’s location to an atom-sized space in less than a second.

The key to their method is to accept the noisiness decreed by the uncertainty principle, and control where it manifests itself. To measure the ion’s position, they basically transfer the uncertainty into its speed, a value they happen to care less about. They call this method “squeezing,” because in a way, they “squeeze” uncertainty from one property to another.

To be clear, squeezing doesn’t violate the uncertainty principle. Nothing can. It’s just that previously, physicists couldn’t negotiate which property of the ion would contain the uncertainty in a particular moment. When the ion is left to its own devices, the fuzziness gets distributed evenly over various properties. With squeezing, “you’re putting the noise where it matters the least,” says physicist Nancy Aggarwal of Northwestern University, who was not involved in the experiment. Slichter’s team still has to pay the same tax, but now they can tell nature which account to charge.