This article explains a lot of things well.
It also gives a meaningful explanation of Schrodinger’s cat. The cat analogy was intended to make the concept sound stupid. That’s why it doesn’t make any sense - it’s supposed to not make sense.
But if you imagine the flat ocean as a sum of waves, it does make sense. The flat ocean is infinite possibilities of sum of turbulent states. It doesn’t make sense to say it is in one state of another. Mathematically, it is in every state at the same time.
It’s like trying to decide if the number 10 is the sum of 5+5 or of 4+6 or of 3.5 + 6.5. It doesn’t make sense to say it is one or the other. It is all of them. Mathematically, it represents an infinite number of different sums (states). That’s all Schrodinger’s cat is saying.
It’s like having a dot painted near the periphery of a very fast spinning wheel. Where is it? It doesn’t make sense to say it is at the top or the bottom or in any specific location. It is at every position on a circle-shaped region.
An electron cloud is just the same. The electron doesn’t have a certain position at a certain time. It is in all positions with a certain probability.
But it took this article for me to understand all of that.
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Huh. that’s never really clicked with me. Thanks for the description!
I have started reading the actual article and will have to finish later. But I think your own comment seems like a pretty reasonable TL;DR given the information of what I have read so far. Kind of a pre-read warmup mentally, and I like when posters can add something to the content being shared!