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Up until now, I've never seen someone explain quantum mechanics in a way that actually left me thinking "that makes sense." Thanks for making me feel a bit smarter than I was before.

It has always driven me nuts when someone says "particles can be in multiple states at the same time" because it makes it sound like quantum mechanics is mystical or magic when it's not. It's really unfortunate because it also plays into the myth that quantum mechanics cannot be understood on some level. This explanation was excellent.

Looking at that Vector graph with the rough and smooth axis suddenly made it click in my head and hit me like a ton of bricks why it's so completely useful to use complex numbers to represent Quantum States. Holy crap it makes so much sense now! Thank you!

Outstanding explanation! There are a lot of smart scientists out there but very few can break it down to a layman’s level like this. You’re doing more for science than you can imagine!

I always accepted this concepts of quantim superposition without giving it much of a thought, since I'm not a physisit it really didn't matter that much to me, but as a mathematician I love this concept, it is waaaay easier to understand and makes absolute sense to me. So thank you Nick

"we're going to be traveling light" if not that scene with laughter i wouldnt even realize the wordplay

I just can't imagine a more intuitive way to understand this. As for the quality of the video animations... there are no words to describe how well done all this is. Thank you very much!

Thank you. I struggled with the perception of things existing in Superposition. Just because we can think of it like that, doesn't mean things have to be until we observe them.

nick i cannot overstate how much i love this and your channel in general. the way you manage to take unintuitive concepts that are generally regarded as "impossible to grasp if you're not in the field" and actually explain them without oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy the way they're often presented shows the incredible pedagogical talent you have developed, and i'm unimaginably thankful for having found your channel

8 years after graduating and going into a career that has nothing to do with physics, I thought my PHYS 486 knowledge was lost forever. But this video, even though it's fairly high level, brought back SO much; much more than I thought it would. I'm with Nerd Clone wanting a video on eigenvectors now.

"We didn't change the cookie state, only the way we represent it mathematically." That's brilliant. This way of thinking is so refreshing.

Amazing that you could explain this so well. Even my old physics profs and books for the lay person use analogy to explain superposition. Now, take that leap and apply this easy to understand logic to quantum entanglement/bell's theorem!

I always thought quantum mechanics was something I could never understand, but I think you've completely changed my mindset with one video. I'm not saying I truly understand it, but this is the first time anything about quantum mechanics has made some amount of sense to me. Great video

You are an amazing science communicator. Thank you for your hard work.

FINALLY there is a smart person that knows how to effectively communicate and impart complex information to us, the simple minded masses despite our short attention spans. Very well done indeed!

This is the first video that actually made me understand this. When you said we were doing away with spin and electrons, I knew it was going to be good.

My man's really pondering the orb right now. Also, that "smooth vs rough" vector space seems to imply the properties of negative smoothness and negative roughness.

This makes more sense than any other superposition videos I have watched in 10 years

You are one of the very few physicists in the world that actually understands physics to a level that can be explained to a child.

Don't know how I missed this one. This is the most straight forward thing I've ever seen on qm. Good one, Nick

Finally someone said it!! It's not a superposition of states. It's only 1 quantum state. It's a superposition of classical states, or of observable states...

The version I was taught used sphere and cube as the two basis vectors. The superposition was drawn as a smoothed cube (or a flattened sphere). The detector was drawn like one of those playdough toys that squeezes the playdough out of a shaped hole. This extends to multiple states by drawing the detector with a round hole, a square hole, a triangle hole, a star hole, and so forth. Avoids having to talk about rough balls and smooth bras :P

"My orbs are invincible..." A line straight out of an early eighties kung-fu movie :) Well presented Nick although I doubt my Missus will understand it

It certainly clarifies how physicists think, which is helpful. My biggest issues with QM are I don't think it's *explained* the right away, but you do it!

Thanks Nick! This really cleared up the superposition myth that has permeated all of physics. I'm a former computer programmer (but not much math), but I'm learning so much from your channel. On the question of German, I had three months of German in 10th grade, then we moved to a school that didn't have German as a course. I'm going to use Babble to continue my learning. Thanks for this wonderful double whammy of excellence!

The bra vector isn't important until we start taking measurements :)

You're the first person to successfully explain a quantum superposition to me, "successfully" meaning that I (think I) understood. Thank you very much for that!

Although some topics are difficult to understand, ur humorous voice & way of conveying makes it easier to listen n understand. u became my fav science communicator.

"I called in back up" holy damn, I'm cracking up. I love how complex your clone world keeps getting.

Wow, it feels like the superposition is on a Hawking's radiation level of "simplified to make it misleading". I love this channel

Finally someone Who explains Quantum Mechanics right!

"Oh no, here it comes" said my brain as I clicked this link. Nick, you're going to be so disappointed in me (or maybe not). At this point in time, I am a quantum mechanics skeptic, because of the application of Occam's Razor. "Particles can phase in and out of existence spontaneously!", "information can travel faster than the speed of light!", "consciousness is somehow intrinsically linked to physics and collapsing the wave function of a double slit experiment actually supports quantum theory!" ... Those sound like fantastical claims to me, and you taught me better than that. Absurd claims in physics need to be held to absurd amounts of rigor, the likes of which we do not yet have the technology to hold quantum mechanics to.

That makes way more sense than being in multiple states. An electron could absolutely be moving 30% left and 70% right if it's moving 100% in a vector that can only be calculated by us to be 30% left and 70% right. Once we launch it against something to see if it's 100% left or right we knock it into one of those. I suppose an interference pattern could then be caused by blocking a specific range of vectors it could be following causing any that would be moving along those to change directions, and while it looks like it's interfering with itself reality is that we merely blocked a vector range that makes it look as such.

Bohr's philosophy physics, if you really get into it, allows you to intuit the nature of this phenomenon really, really well. Nick, you did a great job at breaking down the primary misconception in popular parlance about superposition, but when you really dig into what Bohr was trying to espouse during the birth of this whole field you realize where most people lost the plot, especially anyone who ever said "shut up and calculate". Yes, particles are only in one quantum state at a time, best represented by the vectors of a probabilistic wave function composed of a superposition of complex states, but the POINT, is that those states are ONTOLOGICALLY, not epistemologically, complementary. The Heisenberg uncertainty should have been called the indeterminacy principle because it has nothing to do with our inability to NOT KNOW, and everything to do with complementary features of nature that form reality having mutually exclusive effects on the rest of nature upon each interaction, creating meaning only BY INTERACTING, meaning that quantum particles are not things as we understand them but are more so phenomena constantly in the process of manifesting through their relation to everything around them. To think about particles as deterministic objects with objectively defined characteristics at all times is to misunderstand the instructive lessons of QM. When a detector of any sort measures a particle, it is physically interacting with it, and the differences between the experimental set ups required to enact differential cartesian "cuts" between the observer and the observed, fundamentally exclude access to information about the complex makeup of the former quantum superposition. The crux is that this has NOTHING to do with humans, or our experiments, or our theories. That would make the question of what happens in quantum superposition and afterwards about our knowledge. The complementary nature of quantum phenomena extends to every piece of universe itself. We are not special because we've figured any of this out. All the detectors we use to probe nature are made of nature, it's all the same STUFF. Between the interactions of countless particles that "decohere" to form our world, the universe finds itself excluded from the totality of information about states before and after they've interacted. Someone else below in the comments asked if the orb stays rough or smooth after measurement. If you take this to heart, you immediately understand that the wavefunction begins to smear once again after measurement, and traverse the phase space of possible vectors, until the next "measurement" forces an interaction, and again, and again. There are reasons why you could expect a smooth orb to stay smooth time and again, but its not because it IS smooth outside of an interaction to manifests that smoothness at a scale at which we can read in our medium sized world. This was proven in one of the landmark experiments that Bohr and Einstein could have only wished they'd lived to see: Bell's Inequality, which demonstrates that quantum particles are indeed indeterminate between interactions. Quantum superpostions ARE something singular (if they weren't their probabilities would add to more than one) but that something is probabilistically undefined whether we're looking or not.

It seems like the terminology we use to measure the behavior is being confused for the behavior itself. Thank you for explaining this, it's much clearer than I ever realized.

this is definitely a new breath of air with all the woo woo about this floating around

I have my introduction to quantum physics course next semester and I feel like your videos really give me an edge in the reasoning behind the concepts. I just love how completely radical thinking is required for this stuff! You're a gem mate!

6:57 Bra vector isnt important until we start taking measurements. Is that a joke? 😂😂

I am a firm believer in the idea that the quantum world isn't random and unknowable, we simply have a hard time getting our minds to understand and predict it. This video helps fuel that belief. Thank you.

1:10 Let us ponder the Orbs

the point where it really clicked for me is the cookie's momentum having only one state in spite of having two component vectos along the axes

This is fantastic! When teaching undergrad general physics, I didn't realize bra-ket notation could be introduced in such an inutivite way

As a conceptual learner who really struggles with memorising the nitty gritty facts and formulas, these videos are a goldmine of information for me. They explain things in a way that I can understand WHY something works the way it does, which helps me put all the pieces together. Thank you!!

This is literally one of the best quantum mechanics videos on youtube

That has really taught me something I didn’t know or understand before. I love the way you have simplified this concept and the fact that there is only one state described in vector form. Thank you.

Very well explained, although now I really want an Eigen vector video.

This is the best video about this topic I've ever seen. It made me feel like I could understand it a bit better and I don't have to be satisfied with the explanation that quantum mechanics is simply strange and not really understandable. On top of that, your videos are so interesting and funny, it never gets boring to watch them. And by the way, your pronunciation in German is absolutely well.😁 Greetings from a crazy girl from Germany!

My curiosity is elevated by your video

Thanks for the information! I love how care-free these videos are ^w^

The best explanation of superposition ever. I am interested in quantum computing and no one has made plain where the many many possibilities derive from. This makes it crystal clear. Thank you and please continue the outstanding work.

Nick, mysteries become obvious when YOU explain them! Love it!

You, Sir, are a Master! I love your humor, and I respect your intelligence. For me, this was the perfect explanation of “superposition”. I’m not sure that Schrödinger’s cat feels any more secure in that darned box… Wayne, The-Pain-From-Maine…

I've watched a lot you tube on superposition. This one totally nailed it for me. I feel like I get it a little bit. Who knows if tomorrow I'll be baffled again, lol. Also that cursed bra-ket thing I even understand just a little, tiny bit :) I love this channel. Thank you!

I find polarization of light to be more intuitive to understand when it comes to superposition and the fact that a superposition is a single state. But this example really helped me get away from the idea that the properties in superposition must have some interpretation in spatial dimensions.

Geez, it's about time a good explanation is showed to the masses.

I’ve asked my friends in Eng Phys about this exact question, and they’ve never given me a satisfying answer. You just did, thank you!

Great video, this reminds me why I love physics. More specifically in the case of QM, learning weird stuff that puts into practice what I've learnt in linear algebra and probability.

I've read a lot on this topic and have watched many videos, and while I had grasped the basic concept of super position being probability, I didn't really have a mental framework for thinking about it until this video. I have no idea why I haven't yet subscribed to your channel because I've watched tons of your videos and have loved them all... subscribed now!

The ability to grasp a concept is great, but the ability to convey that concept in such a way that others can also grasp it, is greater. Thank you.

By far the best video on superpositioning. Explained neatly and presented in an understandable way for those first exploring quantum mechanics.

A very clear and lucid explanation! I always hated the concept of Quantum particles Superposition meaning multiple positions at the same time.. this video is a real eye opener giving a clear concept. So far I have not seen anyone doing this before. That is truly awesome! I also love your unique concept of clones and adding a little humor. Thanks a lot Nick!

For the uninitiated mathematicians watching, the "Hilbert" space used to represent quantum states is actually a *projective* Hilbert space where the "ket" vectors have unit magnitude/norm. This is done so that when the dual-space "bra" vectors are used to create inner products, such inner products yield values having complex magnitudes less than or equal to 1. Norm-squaring these inner products give probabilites as shown in the video.

You had me at "We're talking about balls in the land of make-believe."

You always find the best analogies to get your point across. Also *Texture detector, texture detector, texture detector*

As someone with a limited background in modern physics (electronic engineering degree) but an insatiable fascination acquired later in life, I'm constantly consuming "physics for dummies" content. For me, most of it is repetition at this point, so my hope each time is that the content provides some new way to think about a difficult concept - something I haven't already read or heard a hundred times. That way there's a small chance that I'll gain a tiny sliver of new understanding. To be sure, it's an inefficient way to learn, but when it happens, it's SO satisfying. This video is an example of such content. Thank you so much, Mr. Lucid!

Great video and it really help me to understand Bra Ket notation finally. Now about those Eigen Vectors …

I have seen more than 20 superposition videos in spanish and English and this is by far the most explainable one

So Quantum Mechanics are not hard after all, most explainers didn't manage to either fully understand them or failed to come up with the right analogies. Incredible video like always

I am in a superposition of understanding and misunderstanding this video at the same time!!

That was the coolest explanation about double slit experiment and wave functions I ever seen!

Funny how so many people say this is the most comprehensive video on quantum superposition they've seen yet. If only people would just focus on the mathematics like this video does, rather than interpretations.

"We're gonna be travelling light".......NIIIIIIICCCCEEEE!!!

I have been both educated and entertained at the same time! You've said it before that quantum mechanics isn't magic, other channels videos push the idea that it is. Really like your videos, keep making more.

I think I got far too excited when I saw this notification... No I think I had the appropriate level of excitement

Simple ball sorter for rough balls: simply have a large rotating drum with sand paper on the walls, a smooth ball would roll almost straight down, while a rough one would be pulled to one side.

Now, this is the time I have fully understood what superposition is all about, I had also been delusion this whole time. Thanks a lot for this explanation ❤❤❤

Who else thought that speaking of rough and soft balls for over 10 minutes was setting up a Manscaped sponsor, only to be shocked when Babbel popped up at the end? Perhaps today's sponsor was in a superposition state and the "Texture detector, Texturdetektor, Détecteur de texture" had to pick one and only sponsor state....?

This is the first time I ever understood superpositions. Thank you!

Nice to see the complex metaphor of using math to model physics explained in detail, helping everyone to not be confused when projecting expectations using those metaphors. Kudos.

Thank you - finally a correct explanation of quantum superposition on KZfaq. Being a retired physicist, I have been annoyed by all of the incorrect information about quantum superposition and particles simultaneously being in multiple states that I have seen heretofore on KZfaq. I am glad that here you introduced the quantum state vector concept to explain superposition. I have always thought that the concept of state vectors in Hilbert space makes many of the concepts in Quantum Mechanics that many call "weird" very understandable and in some cases even intuitive once one becomes familiar with vector space operations, i.e., vector algebra. One thing I think you did not state explicitly, but should have, is that the measurement setup defines the set of basis vectors which define the possible measurement outcomes for that setup. What those who loosely say that a particle is in multiple states simultaneously mean is that the single state vector of the particle consists of a superposition of the multiple basis vector states, i.e., a superposition of the multiple possible measurement outcome states for the particular measurement setup. Of course, for anyone familiar with vector algebra, there is nothing "weird" about such a superposition principle since it is well known in vector algebra that any vector in a vector space can be expressed as the weighted sum of the orthonormal basis vectors that span the vector space, and the weightings are given by the projections (dot products) of the vector onto the basis vectors. Also, measurements are projections of the state vector onto the basis vectors and the operations are just the mathematical notations representing those projections.

I think it really comes down to how you define a “state”. Of course the system is always in a single “state” however complex that state might be. But we can also see the state as the combination of several states. That is what we call “superposition”. More or less, a quantum particle is always in a superposition, whatever state it’s in, due to the uncertainty principle. However, there exists the simplest, most statistically accurate state that cannot be seen as the combination of simpler states. That is the ground state of QHO, which meets the limit of uncertainty principle.

This video is brilliant, i never thought of superposition like this. To make and example in real life computers use binary code and that's use only 0 and 1 but actually the components inside the computer use electric values that go from 0 to 5 Volts. The power that go through the cable could be 2.3 volts but the computer is only able to read that as a 0 or a 1 ans so the computer will approximate the value to 0. 2.3 volts is a superposition

I just want to say that from the first time I learned of Schrodinger's equation when I was a wee lass, intuitively it didn't make sense to me the way that wave form type equations were explained.. I understand the concept of probability, but it doesn't STAY there.. It isn't in a probabilistic state.. It's in the state that it's in.. It's only our inability to comprehend its state that necessarily precludes us from being able to determine or prove it.. This has always struck me as a "god of the gaps" type scenario.. The more we are able to prove experimentally, the less we rely on probability to determine vectors, and the more elucidated we are about the nature of our reality. I wish I had the brainpower to study physics, it's truly beautiful.

I've been saying this for a while. Classical analogies we read in books and see in QM documentaries would be like a dog asking what human-level concepts like justice or geometry "smell like".

That spinning ball joke got me good even though I have read and heard it many times before 😂. Classic

Quantum physics in a nutshell "It's like a ball that is spinning, except it isn't a ball and isn't spinning" Also, you just made me spill my coffee with the delivery, superb

This is one of my favorite new Channels! ^.^

Quantum phenomena have no classical corollory. Trying to "understand" quantum is the same as trying to explain Quantum with a Classical Corollory, which is impossible. "Shut up and calculate is the best ." This is a good video. Well done.

Thank you for making this video. Quantum superposition is probably one of the most mystified concepts in all of QM in popular science texts and videos, even though it's literally equivalent to the superposition of vectors that anyone who's completed high school mathematics should know.

That was amazing, thank you! And super impressed that when I checked your vector example, it still had unit magnitude. You’d be amazed how many KZfaqrs would fail to achieve that. 👏

It's the first time that I see your chanel and I think that your explanations are great. New subscriber :D

I'm just gonna quote this : Up until now, I've never seen someone explain quantum mechanics in a way that actually left me thinking "that makes sense." Thanks for making me feel a bit smarter than I was before.

I love that you went with a cookie to illustrate velocity vectors. Reminds me of how one way to represent scalar quantities like mass and certain supernatural units is in reference to Twinkies...

1:33 I was kind of expecting the orb to become a polandball.

3:18 "Surprisingly the name makes sense" 🤣😆😆

Anyone greating me by calling me « crazy » is starting on my good side. He must be on to something… As usual : great job!

This was a wonderfully enlightening video. This concept actually kind of makes sense now. Thanks for the great science!

Great analogy, it shows clearly that the states are states of probability, not ‘real’ states, and given that our ability to measure the states has a hard limit that can’t get rid of the probabilities, it’s necessary that the models we use contains the probabilities as states.

this guy makes me love physics again, I might not understand 100%, BUT I won't give up and its better to understand something than nothing, and this guy made me understand something, thanks :)