Schrödinger’s cat

In chemistry there is a handful of ways to represent a molecule and the whereabouts of its electrons. The silly thing is that we never know where an electron is; I could tell you it is definitely within this region of space, or that there is a high probability of it being here, but never can anyone say with full certainty where an electron is at any given time. So we create our representation of a molecule knowing that in reality the molecule does not ever resemble our representation. To fix this gaping hole of identity, scientists came up with resonance structures. A resonance structure is a modification of the original representation to account for electrons being here or there or there or here or over there. Every good molecule will have two or three or four resonance structures. In high school chemistry we are taught that a molecule will dance around each resonance structure; at one moment the molecule will exist as resonance structure A and at another moment resonance structure B etc. But the reality is that every molecule is all of its resonance structures all at once all the time. We are just so stupid and limited that we cannot come up with an adequate representation of the true essence of the molecule and thus we resort to having however many different pictures for this one unified thing! You are probably thinking, whatever Amira chemistry. But I think that this silliness with resonance transcends chemistry and can be seen throughout each of our ideologies. Whether we are looking at our best friends, God, raindrops, trees or ourselves, we all struggle with this dissonance between reality and resonance; regardless of who we think we are, and the different ways in which we represent ourselves, or even the identities we fail to recognize, we are who we are. We can come up with so many different ways to understand and classify the people and things around and within us, but time and time again we do not realize that every thing and every person is so much more than the constructions we build inside our heads.

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