If I understand it correctly, the "Heisenberg's microscope" was a heuristic introduced by Heisenberg in order to explain the eponymous uncertainty principle. The idea would be that, when attempting to measure the position of a particle, the particle's momentum is perturbed as a consequence of interacting with the photon or other particle that is used to carry out the measurement.
On the other hand, according to our present understanding of QM, reality is intrinsically random, regardless from the precision of our measuring instruments, and the uncertainty principle is a theorem about certain "random variables" (or rather the statistics that happens when you repeatedly measure observables on an ensemble of identically prepared systems).
But the fact that photons (and what not) are used for measurements and the interaction perturbs the "object" system is still true.
The first paragraphs of Wikipedia's entry claim that Heisenberg's intuitive explanation of his mathematical result is misleading and cites "violations of uncertainty relations" under "weak measurements".
Q. According to our modern view of QM, what's the relation between Heisenberg's uncertainty relation (which is a theorem, and is interpreted as being about ensemble measurement statistics) and the phenomena involving photons (and other stuff) perturbing a quantum observable during a measurement process? What's the business with weak measurements?
