4 ms·

But they are right, it is totally weird. When people say that they usually mean counterintuitive with respect to everyday experience. It makes it progressivel

But they are right, it is totally weird. When people say that they usually mean counterintuitive with respect to everyday experience. It makes it progressively harder for lay people to grasp bits of it, from classical mechanics, to general relativity, to QM. Maybe it’s even a factor for theoreticians, but that’s just speculation.

noobermin 9y ago
I guess my perspective is that a lot of physics is weird. When I learned Newton's First Law in undergrad, it was counterintuitive, because I based my knowledge on experience. The idea that throwing a ball out of the window of a moving car would have a velocity component in the direction of the car contradicted naive experience of putting your hand outside the window and feeling the wind. Not just GR, but even Newtonian gravity is weird, how is the force making me fall the same as the force that makes planets move in circles[0]? May be "weird" isn't the word but "confusing/unexpected" is. I feel like a lot of the "weirdness" of QM is really due to physicists who were wedded to classical ways of thinking are confounded when x and p don't commute, and what that means. That plus not knowing about the delayed choice quantum eraser (not their fault).
- tbabb 9y ago
  There is a "sermon" that is given at the beginning of almost every QM intro lecture, and as it was given by Feynman more than a half century ago, it went something like: > "Quantum mechanics is weird. Particles are not like baseballs; leave your classical intuitions behind." Which is all well and good. But it has subtly shifted to: > "Quantum mechanics is weird. Our human brains are not wired to understand it intuitively, so don't try, because you will fail and get the wrong answer. Just turn the math crank and get results." And IMHO that attitude is both (a) flatly wrong and (b) mind poison. With regards to (a), the human brain is a turning machine-- it can simulate any rules. Learn the rules and work with them enough, and they will become intuitive. If you can learn DiffEQ or Fourier transforms, you can learn QM. Actually, the rules for the "spooky bits" are probably simpler than both of those two things. For (b), all these undergraduates grow up into research physicists and still believe the creed they were solemnly lectured on Day One about how to think about quantum mechanics (which is to NOT think about it). As such, they are all very bad scientists because they have stopped wondering about what makes it all tick. Case in point: A good fraction of scientists still believe in "wavefunction collapse", which blows my mind, because it's so self-evidently rejectable[1]. Science went from a Plum Pudding atom to quantum field theory in about 30 years. It's been nearly a century since then, and we don't really understand things much more deeply, and I think this is because we are too busy banging particles together and not asking "why" enough. I (boldly) posit that if undergrads didn't get the "don't ask" lecture, quantum physics would be decades ahead of where it is today. We can understand, and we should try, and I would love it if undergrads were told that instead. The kind of thing in this article is what more serious physicists should be doing. [1] This is a controversial statement, but that's kind of my point. Explaining Why Not Copenhagen is probably a topic for a separate diatribe.
  - sgt101 9y ago
    I'm certain that human brains aren't Turing machines; we know that the entire set of human brains halts! Also human brains do not have infinite tapes or an approximate equivalent. So it can't be said that it can simulate any rules.
    - tbabb 9y ago
      > ackchyually.jpg ;) I think you got my point, though? The rules of QM are not a busy beaver function. They are simple and they can be learned because the human mind is flexible. Yes, manipulating the algebra can be very complicated indeed, but that is because we are analyzing how the simple rules carry out and looking for an exact answer. It's like playing checkers vs. solving checkers; or learning the rules of Conway's Life vs. actually running a simulation. We can understand the rules and gain meaningful intuitions about both. If we want an exact answer it gets complicated.
      - Lambdanaut 9y ago
        If I were to be bold enough to rephrase what you so elegantly said. We're looking at the universe as the pre-copricornians were. Seeing chaos and logging the data, believing that the order behind the masterpiece was all locked away in God's noggin, hidden from man's grasp. Instead we should be looking at the universe as Copernicus did. Re-frame our base assumptions. Among all this chaotic data is a simpler pattern. It may make no sense whatsoever to our human assumptions about reality, but if we are to know reality, then we must evolve within reality.
      - sgt101 9y ago
        I looked the jpg up, and you are a bit mean!!! I am trying not to cry real tears ;) I get the busy beavers thing, humans can't do that, nor computers - it says nothing much! But... are there things that are not computable that aren't formalised either - for example the choosing to determine when shifting system is needed to prove something that may or may not be proved in a particular system?
        9y ago

noobermin 9y ago

I guess my perspective is that a lot of physics is weird. When I learned Newton's First Law in undergrad, it was counterintuitive, because I based my knowledge on experience. The idea that throwing a ball out of the window of a moving car would have a velocity component in the direction of the car contradicted naive experience of putting your hand outside the window and feeling the wind. Not just GR, but even Newtonian gravity is weird, how is the force making me fall the same as the force that makes planets move in circles[0]? May be "weird" isn't the word but "confusing/unexpected" is. I feel like a lot of the "weirdness" of QM is really due to physicists who were wedded to classical ways of thinking are confounded when x and p don't commute, and what that means. That plus not knowing about the delayed choice quantum eraser (not their fault).

tbabb 9y ago
There is a "sermon" that is given at the beginning of almost every QM intro lecture, and as it was given by Feynman more than a half century ago, it went something like: > "Quantum mechanics is weird. Particles are not like baseballs; leave your classical intuitions behind." Which is all well and good. But it has subtly shifted to: > "Quantum mechanics is weird. Our human brains are not wired to understand it intuitively, so don't try, because you will fail and get the wrong answer. Just turn the math crank and get results." And IMHO that attitude is both (a) flatly wrong and (b) mind poison. With regards to (a), the human brain is a turning machine-- it can simulate any rules. Learn the rules and work with them enough, and they will become intuitive. If you can learn DiffEQ or Fourier transforms, you can learn QM. Actually, the rules for the "spooky bits" are probably simpler than both of those two things. For (b), all these undergraduates grow up into research physicists and still believe the creed they were solemnly lectured on Day One about how to think about quantum mechanics (which is to NOT think about it). As such, they are all very bad scientists because they have stopped wondering about what makes it all tick. Case in point: A good fraction of scientists still believe in "wavefunction collapse", which blows my mind, because it's so self-evidently rejectable[1]. Science went from a Plum Pudding atom to quantum field theory in about 30 years. It's been nearly a century since then, and we don't really understand things much more deeply, and I think this is because we are too busy banging particles together and not asking "why" enough. I (boldly) posit that if undergrads didn't get the "don't ask" lecture, quantum physics would be decades ahead of where it is today. We can understand, and we should try, and I would love it if undergrads were told that instead. The kind of thing in this article is what more serious physicists should be doing. [1] This is a controversial statement, but that's kind of my point. Explaining Why Not Copenhagen is probably a topic for a separate diatribe.
- sgt101 9y ago
  I'm certain that human brains aren't Turing machines; we know that the entire set of human brains halts! Also human brains do not have infinite tapes or an approximate equivalent. So it can't be said that it can simulate any rules.
  - tbabb 9y ago
    > ackchyually.jpg ;) I think you got my point, though? The rules of QM are not a busy beaver function. They are simple and they can be learned because the human mind is flexible. Yes, manipulating the algebra can be very complicated indeed, but that is because we are analyzing how the simple rules carry out and looking for an exact answer. It's like playing checkers vs. solving checkers; or learning the rules of Conway's Life vs. actually running a simulation. We can understand the rules and gain meaningful intuitions about both. If we want an exact answer it gets complicated.
    - Lambdanaut 9y ago
      If I were to be bold enough to rephrase what you so elegantly said. We're looking at the universe as the pre-copricornians were. Seeing chaos and logging the data, believing that the order behind the masterpiece was all locked away in God's noggin, hidden from man's grasp. Instead we should be looking at the universe as Copernicus did. Re-frame our base assumptions. Among all this chaotic data is a simpler pattern. It may make no sense whatsoever to our human assumptions about reality, but if we are to know reality, then we must evolve within reality.
    - sgt101 9y ago
      I looked the jpg up, and you are a bit mean!!! I am trying not to cry real tears ;) I get the busy beavers thing, humans can't do that, nor computers - it says nothing much! But... are there things that are not computable that aren't formalised either - for example the choosing to determine when shifting system is needed to prove something that may or may not be proved in a particular system?
      - 9y ago