Sooo... the idea is that there's a cat in a box with some poison that could be released at any random time. Until we look inside the box, we don't know if the cat is alive or dead. Thus, when it is in the box, it can exist in two superimposed states, both alive and dead.
I totally don't get this. It seems to me that saying the cat is BOTH alive and dead is simply a way for us to say that we have no idea what's actually going on. We don't *know*.
What's actually going on is that the cat is actually in one of two states, alive or dead. Just because we don't *know* what state it's in doesn't mean that it's *not* in one of these two states. Opening the box and observing it shouldn't magically force it into being in one of two states.
Like... just because we don't know precisely how much fossil fuel we have left on this planet doesn't mean that there isn't a precise amount. It's just that we don't know. We don't know the exact coordinates of a bird flying overhead as we speak, but that doesn't mean that a bird's *not* there, flying overhead, at a certain coordinate. We just don't know about it.
Considering that I don't get this, I have a hard time wrapping my head around quantum mechanics and quantum computing. A single quantum bit (qubit) can be in multiple states at the same time instead of a 0 or a 1, like a classical bit. But how does this make sense? To me, all it means is we have no way of knowing what state it is actually in. It's still in a certain state at any point in time, we just don't know what it is. In quantum computing, how is it possible to use our complete lack of information to do actual computing?