I'm a physics major trying to get my bearings in an organic chemistry course I'm taking this semester, and my professor didn't satisfactorily answer a question I had about resonance structures.

He said that we shouldn't think of resonance structures as being seperate configurations that a molecule could have, but that we should instead think of compounds with resonance structures as existing in a combination of all these states at once.

I read in another string on these forums that resonance hybrids are a superposition of resonance structures.  So are resonance hybrids in a state of quantum superposition between their resonance structures?  Or do they actually exist in a singular state that's a low-energy "compromise" between their resonance structures?

This question may be confusing, because it's possible to think of a specific quantum superposition of states as a being a single relatively well-defined state, too, but I'm not sure how to clarify my question.  I'm new to quantum mechanics, too.

Any help is much appreciated.

Ok, this makes sense.  Thanks a lot, you've made this significantly easier to understand for me.