[hcarvalhoalves]

I don't need a degree in Physics to understand Newton's laws, even though I couldn't derive these laws on my own. Heck, the explanation fits in three lines, and it explains a ton of things.

That's the kind of understanding I mean. It seems there isn't one concise, simple explanation for these effects. I wonder if it's because the reasoning behind it is that complex that you need to resort to esoteric math and abstractions (in which case, the current theories might be crude, Occam's razor and all), or if it's because no one truly comprehends it enough to explain concisely.

By the way, I picked up Leonard Susskind's lectures to watch. It was all fine up to special relativity - his explanation about frames of reference was so obvious, it just made sense. After that, though, nothing made sense anymore.

[asayers]

Newton's Laws fit into three lines because most of us are already familiar with the integral concepts: force, mass, inertial reference frames, etc. The concepts involved in quantum mechanics are fairly alien to most people, so explaining the theory takes longer. The fundamentals of orthodox QM can be fit into three principles: 1) The Time-Dependent Schrödinger Equation; 2) The Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation; and 3) The Born Rule. Even writing these out in full doesn't take long. Explaining what they mean, however, can take a while.

Frames of reference are fairly obvious in SR. In General Relativity they're more non-trivial.