This always confuses me and I’m not sure how it works. Please explain…
In: 252
One of the best explanations I’ve seen, while not *100%* accurate, gets the point across decently well and intuitively.
Imagine you’re taking a picture of a car speeding past you, and you only have time to take one picture. You can use a slow shutter speed, in which case the car will be “smeared out” by its motion blur. You could then determine roughly how fast the car was moving based on the length of the blur, but it’s a bit difficult to say where exactly the car is since it’s so blurry.
Or, you could use a fast shutter speed, giving you a nice, crisp picture of the car with no motion blur. Now, you know exactly where the car is, but you can’t really tell how fast it’s moving. You could try somewhere in the middle, but there’s a fundamental limit to how precise you can be with the two measurements. That’s the Uncertainty Principle.
A similar thing happens when trying to measure electrons, you either get a well-defined point that’s easy to pinpoint but difficult to say how fast it’s moving, or you get a smeared-out blur that you can get a speed from, but it’s difficult to determine where it is. Things get even messier when you throw in wave-particle duality, quantum mechanics, and other ways that physics doesn’t behave as expected on such small scales.
Latest Answers