what is superposition explained with an analogy for my literary oriented brain to make sense of?

Question

what is superposition explained with an analogy for my literary oriented brain to make sense of?

In: Physics

Answer 1

So let’s say you are writing a book.

You have several ideas for what could happen in the next chapter, but you’re not fully sold on which to pick.

So you start to sketch out a few different versions of that chapter. You don’t write them fully, but you put in enough to know what is going on.

Now you can move on to the chapter after that, and everything is fine, the book is back on track (and you’ll go back to fix that one chapter later). But it turns out you aren’t careful enough when writing the rest of the book, and the final version of the next chapter ends up relying on bits from all the different versions of the one awkward chapter.

So the next chapter only makes sense if *all the versions* of the previous chapter are true – maybe with different weight given to different versions – *even if the versions contradict each other*.

The rest of the book is fine; one version, all put together. The first part of the book is fine, again, just one version. But for this middle bit it only works if you have several versions of the chapter superimposed on each other; all being (partly) true.

———–

The physics is a little more complex (maths pun intended), as you can get weird situations where if you include a particular plot point in a couple of different versions of the superposed chapter, they can cancel out.