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by mitthrowaway2 831 days ago
If we lived at the quantum scale, then classical physics would be the weird one. Quantum chromodynamics is only confusing for two reasons: it differs from our everyday experience so we don't have an intuition for it, and because it has a large number of mutually-interacting (but basic) components.

Richard Feynman put it very well:

"The world is strange, the whole universe is very strange, but see when you look at the details then you find out that the rules are very simple, of the game, the mechanical rules by which you can figure out exactly what's going to happen when the situation is simple. It's again this chess game; if you're in just the corner with only a few pieces involved, you can work out exactly what's going to happen. And you can always do that when there's only a few pieces. And so you know you understand it. And yet, in the real game there's so many pieces you can't figure out what's going to happen.

"There's such a lot in the world, there's so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomena that it's almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomena can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules... But it is not complicated, it's just a lot of it."