ELI5, if bits are like a lightbulb being turned on and off, what are qubits?

Question

ELI5, if bits are like a lightbulb being turned on and off, what are qubits?

In: 2

Answer 1

What I WANT to say is that qubits are akin to dimmer switch light bulbs, which can be anywhere on the spectrum between on and off, but it is more complicated than that.

Quibits can be “half way between” 0 and 1, but there’s more to it than that.

Two quibit can both be half 1 and half 0, but still completely different from one another.

You can think of binary bits as apple or orange. Clear, distinct and different.

You can think of quantum qubits as smoothies with different quantities of apple juice and orange juice.

This analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s the most accurate explanation I can give without diving into imaginary numbers and other abstract nonELI5 concepts.

EDIT:

You know what, here’s a really butchered explanation for you that might help.

Let’s stick with the smoothie idea.

Qubits are like a smoothie mixing oranges and apples, BUT the ingredients are spread across FOUR cups instead of ONE. Let’s call the cups north, east, south and west.

You CAN mix all of the orange and apple together into the east cup, but you could put some of the orange in the north cup or spread orange across North and East, while apple is in South and West.

In this way, you can have HALF apple and HALF orange, but there’s many different ways that you might get that. There is no one “halfway between apple and orange”.

In fact, you might have two quibits that are both halfway between apple and orange, but one has the apple and orange both in the east and another has apple in West and orange in East. These two (despite both being half and half) are considered “opposite” in the same way that all orange or all apple are considered “opposite”.

EDIT EDIT:

Another analogy is colour.

Binary is black and white.

Qubits are any colour.

There is no one colour that is “half way” between back and white. There is a grey colour between black and white, but there’s also a blue or a red and so on that could be considered half way. There are countless half way points, but they are all very much different from one another.