I'm reading Hawking's A Briefer History of Time and it's explained that Heisenberg demonstrated his uncertainty principle based on fundamental limitations of positional meaurememt by basically bouncing photons off something and measuring how long they take to bounce back. (Maybe I didn't explain that quite right) This uncertainty is so great that to measure position down to the atomic scale would throw off our ability to measure velocity by kilometers. Or something like that.
Hearing this, my immediate thought was: Well wouldn't he have to prove that every other possible method of measuring position suffers the same limitation?
For example, the gravitational pull exerted by an atom is extremely small, and we don't fully understand gravity (haven't proven a theory of quantum gravity). To my knowledge, we haven't invented an instrument to measure the gravitational pull exerted by one particular atom upon another with great precision.
But in the future if we did invent such an instrument, we could, in the vacuum of space, measure the gravitational pull attributed to the atom who's position we desire to measure from three or more points in space, triangulating the measured pulls, and arrive at a precise position for said atom.
It seems to me that to prove the H.U.P. one would also need to prove the imprecision of measuring any other interactive forces between two particles, not just measurement of light. Since we don't have perfect theories of how all the forces work on quantum scales, such proofs, at least for now, seem impossible.
I assume I just misunderstand the problem.