Just to continue this tangent: The skill you mention (holding impossible things in your head) is closely related to debugging. You observe "impossible" things

Just to continue this tangent: The skill you mention (holding impossible things in your head) is closely related to debugging. You observe "impossible" things (returned signal power is negative, etc.), and accept them, and work backwards to how it could happen. How many times have you had a junior person come to you with a bug, and you ask, did you check A, B, and C? And they will say, "I checked everything and it's all OK." It's hard to kick their brain out of the rut of thinking that everything is nominal. They make no progress because they're wasting all their mental energy arguing that everything is, in fact, OK.