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> Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works? Unfortunately yes, all of us are. This is not a problem with physics or abstractions. It's

> Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works? Unfortunately yes, all of us are. This is not a problem with physics or abstractions. It's a problem with our intuition. Our intuition is based on evolution and life experience, which is all formed based on mostly solid objects from 1cm to 100m moving at 1m/s to 100m/s. The universe however does not care what meatbags can experience with our senses. It doesn't mean that our complex math abstractions are necessarily correct - but they are more correct than casual intuition. You can train that intuition with enough work with the maths. For example, you can map most of basic electricity to water flow and pressure, and some electromagnetic waves to waves in water - but you need to make a small jump to abstraction to combine both, and a large jump to get a gut feeling for special relativity to "feel right". The crazy part is really that mathematical abstractions exist for all these things at all. There seems to be no natural reason that physics should be describable by small elegant formulas at all, let alone our experience of throwing rocks into a pond. Why isn't particle physics as messy as organic chemistry?

cynusx 7y ago
You are looking at it from the wrong way. It is not nature that describes itself in math, it's people who describe in math what their current understanding is of how nature works. The more mathematical simplicity in the formula, the better we understand it. Organic chemistry is harder because our powers to observe it are computationally and experimentally limited at this point. Human intuition is based on limited sensors, boundaries which we have overcome with science and applied science over time. Our intuition had to be collectively replaced with rigorous mathematical methodology to incorporate these foreign sensors.

cynusx 7y ago

You are looking at it from the wrong way. It is not nature that describes itself in math, it's people who describe in math what their current understanding is of how nature works. The more mathematical simplicity in the formula, the better we understand it. Organic chemistry is harder because our powers to observe it are computationally and experimentally limited at this point. Human intuition is based on limited sensors, boundaries which we have overcome with science and applied science over time. Our intuition had to be collectively replaced with rigorous mathematical methodology to incorporate these foreign sensors.