[BalinKing]

As I understand it: The rules are simple, but not necessarily intuitive.

[lisper]

Exactly right. The rules of quantum mechanics are in their essence not much more complicated than high school algebra. It is the logical consequences of those rules that are hard to wrap your brain around.

[dkersten]

I have a couple of books on quantum field theory and it looks a lot harder than high school algebra.

[lisper]

Go read a book on number theory some time. It looks hard too. But it is about nothing more than the properties of the natural numbers, which any grade schooler can understand.

Likewise, QM looks hard, but at its core it is little more than linear algebra, which any high-school math student can (or at least should be able to) understand.

[dkersten]

Everything can be broken down to simple easy to understand little bits. The complexity comes from there being many, many of these little bits.

[lisper]

Yes, that is exactly my point. The core of QM consists of very few bits.