4 ms·

At least when concepts like the curvature of space-time are discussed, I can intuitively conduct thought experiments. When we start talking about the Higgs and

• jug 11y ago
  "Different fundamental particles are like a crowd of people running through mud. Some particles, like quarks, have big boots that get covered with lots of mud; others, like electrons, have little shoes that barely gather any mud at all. Photons don’t wear shoes—they just glide over the top of the mud without picking any up. And the Higgs field is the mud."
  • stan_rogers 11y ago
    ...and that breaks down so utterly when you consider inertia. Specifically, "bodies in motion tend to remain in motion". The math works, but the mental model doesn't. Almost nothing at the scales that need a quantum explanation can be adequately represented by monkeys who evolved to understand bananas. We can pretend to. We can give names to phenomena; call them particles and fields and so forth. We can make sense of the math. We can make accurate predictions. But when we really consider the implications of those things we claim to understand, we're forced to admit that we really don't understand them at all. It's turtles all the way down, and it turns out that the turtles aren't really there at all (for any reasonable definition of really).