This always confuses me and I’m not sure how it works. Please explain…
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It is really difficult to wrap your head around it, but basically the best you can do is accepting that the rules of the world are changing if things are getting smaller and smaller.
The really small things behave very differently from how we describe our world.
The biggest difference is that those really small things are not objects as we imagine a thing,like a ball. A ball would have a defined border where the ball starts and everything outside is not the ball.
But for example you can imagine a crowd of people (like a mass event). As you get closer, you notice that there’s more and more people as they stand more dense closer to the stage. There’s a point where you can say you’re totally standing in the crowd. If you move out, there’s less and less crowded people, at a point you would find people who look like lonely bystanders, isolated from the crowd. How would you tell if such person belongs to the crowd, or just passing by? What I want to say, you can never precisely draw the borders around a crowd, because there’s always a fuzzy unclear layer between the “certainly crowd” and the “certainly non-crowd”. Besides not knowing where the crowd ends, what you can do is finding the “crowdiest” part and call it the center, as a kind of point of location on the map. Like the GPS address of the crowd.
Now, the electron somehow manages to live by the same principles but without a crowd of electrons. Just like, being alone, it never has a precisely defined border, where you know the electron is inside. It’s not a ball then. It’s like a smear in the space, always a little electron-ness being somewhere outside of where you think it is.
Small side note about speed. Speed is a vectorial amount. The direction of movement *belongs* to the speed. In the everyday usage we are a bit sloppy because we say a car goes at a speed of 10 mph (or km/h or whatever you use). But in fact if we don’t know which direction the car goes, in terms of physics we do not know it’s speed.
So if we say we don’t know the speed of an electron, it means more like we don’t know which direction it goes.
Now what is happening, is that the electron, a big undefined smear is going zig-zag somewhere. If you want to see the current trajectory of the smeary stuff, you have to zoom out. But then you will have a huge smear in which the electron can be anywhere so you loose the precise position. If you want to find the “main body” of the electron within the smear (which can totally be anywhere, not in the middle), then you need to zoom in, but the more you zoom in, the less clue you have which direction the whole thing is moving.
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