(Sorry if my wording is bad and sorry for no formatting I’m on mobile)
Why is it that two people can’t observe the same object and one measures momentum and the other the position of something.
Also, why can’t we use the momentum to calculate its future position, and then since we already have the momentum we can then have the position at the same time
(disclaimer: I know that the example I provided was wrong, I just want to know why it’s wrong)
In: Physics
The basic idea is that you can’t know the position and the wavelength of a thing, because ideal waves don’t have a well defined position yet particles do. The problem is that real particles behave both like a particle and a wave. So when I measure the wavelength of a particle, I’m forcing it to behave more like a wave and less like a particle and so it’s position becomes more uncertain. Likewise when measuring the position, I’m making the particle act like a particle and so I lose it’s wavelike behaviour. It can’t act like an ideal particle and an ideal wave at the same time. You can get clever and get it to act kind of like both (don’t measure the exact position but instead measure if it’s in a particular region or not), but never exactly.
The momentum only comes in later due to the fact that the momentum of any real particle is directly related to it’s wavelength, thus knowing somethings momentum means that you know it’s wavelength and so the particle is more wave than particle and therefore doesn’t have a well defined position.
If you want to dive deeper, I’d recommend looking into some videos regarding the Fourier transform, since that is the actual math that relates position and wavelength.
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