This always confuses me and I’m not sure how it works. Please explain…
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It’s an inherent property of things that are waves.
Technically it’s momentum and position. Speed will always be C (the speed of light).
Momentum is: how much mass you have and how fast you’re moving.
At these scales, everything is too small to have anything like a physical surface. It is instead a sort of fuzzy area of energy that vibrates.
In your mind’s eye, I want you to draw a single wave.
The height of that wave is its energy. which is also how much energy/mass it has, which is also its momentum.
The width of that wave is its position.
Now we conduct our experiment:
Since what I’m trying to look at is a few orders of magnitude smaller than light itself , I have to use something else. So we use another electron.
You can fire one of two types of electrons. Low energy and high energy.
Your low energy electron will have a long wavelength that does not go up very high. The high energy electron will have a very short wavelength but a very high peak.
If I use the low energy electron it will definitely hit the electron I’m looking for, but I won’t know exactly where. Also, when it “bounces off”, the amount of energy it has will have a slightly different amount that I can measure. So I will have a good idea of how much energy for more momentum I’ve imparted to the electron in question but I don’t know exactly where it’s at.
If I use the high energy electron, having a much shorter wavelength means I can get a very high level of precision about where that other electron is. however, since it has so much momentum or energy once I hit it the other electron now has a bunch of energy. And I can’t know how much energy was imparted to it without hitting it with *another* electron.
It makes a sort of intuitive sense if you just look at the two different wave types: wide and flat Vs short and high.
Wide and flat: A lot of positions to the left and right (position) not many positions up and down(momentum).
Short and tall: few positions to the left and right(position) a lot of positions up and down (momentum)
Sorry I rambled.
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