Eli5 Why can’t we “know” the speed and position of an electron simultaneously? Why can we only measure one of these properties at a time?

Question

This always confuses me and I’m not sure how it works. Please explain…

In: 252

Answer 1

The best analogy I heard was this: Imagine you have a 1gb camera and you go to a soccer game. You can take a picture of the all in play, and you can tell exactly where the ball is on the field in the picture by looking at the lines and the background to pinpoint it’s position. But just looking at the picture you have no idea what direction it came from or it’s going. So you switch your camera and make a video of the ball. Now you can tell what direction it came from and where it’s going. But your camera is only 1gb so the resolution is terrible. The ball in the video is a fuzzy blob. You can’t pinpoint exactly where it is on the field because it’s too blurry. So you can either know exactly where the ball is, or the direction it’s coming from or going to, but never both.