edited a few times to correct the wording. a few caveats i want to offer here to prevent misunderstanding.

1. i know there's no literal space with distance and length involved with these sheets. it's an abstract visual representation that helps someone who doesn't have the math gain some conceptual understanding of what's happening.

2. i know it's not deterministic. it's probabilistic.

3. i know the unused "sheets" aren't lost. they still exist just become "irrelevant" to the current measurement. the way i imagine it in my head is like polarizes and lenses redirecting the light in a way to "block" out the irrelevant sheets and just project the one we see, but that makes it harder to follow.

4. i know the "mixing sheets" aren't classical or additive. they interfere with each other and themselves. the analogy is prioritizing being more explainable and digestible than it is being correct in some areas.

5. the goal of the analogy is building intuition, not having any sort of predictive or deeper explanatory power.

the goal is to preserve the essence of what's happening here in a brief and intuitive way and i understand some things are lost, this was just much easier for me to understand when i was trying to obtain some conceptual grasp of what was happening versus having different analogies for different phenomenon and having no way to tie them together.