[jes5199]

no, it can’t actually be made simple. Qbits are fundamentally unfamiliar. They have restrictions like “you cannot copy them” and “all operations must be reversible”. And what you get at the end is basically flipping a weighted coin, where the probabilities are constrained by the operations you did earlier. The only way to understand it is to immerse yourself in it. Think: motivated grad student, not puppy.

[plank]

A former physicist myself (with a PhD gotten for theoretical research into quantum optics): I really like the ‘weighted coin’ methaphor.