[krastanov]

While this is a lovely sentiment and a perfectly fine way to approach the sciences (and also engineering oriented disciplines), not all physicist think that way.

There is a lot of beauty in deriving laws of nature without relying on physical intuition. A lot of beautiful results are based on purely requiring laws to be self-consistent and seeing that only one possible law is self-consistent. For instance check out what Scott Aaronson says about probability in quantum mechanics. While Feynman in his famous lectures just says that quantum mechanics is counter intuitive and you are not supposed to truly understand it, Scott Aaronson uses math to explain how to correct your intuition (and I am stressing, this is not just about learning the math, it is about basing your intuition on the math, not on the everyday experience).

[pdpi]

QM is counter-intuitive only insofar as your intuition is naturally wired for a classical mechanics world. Given enough practice, QM eventually becomes second nature too. You pretty much _need_ to go through that process to function at the highest levels.

There's a good post by Terrence Tao about this topic, I think it was posted here some time ago:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s...

[gizmo686]

The math behind quantum mechanics is intuitive if you view it as a generalization of probability theory to allow negative numbers. The counter-intuitive part is that the resulting system turns out to be a good model of the world.

[medlyyy]

http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

The above is a good accessible exposition of this perspective. Though it would help to have some acquaintance with ordinary probability as well as basic linear algebra.

[jivardo_nucci]

Wrong on two levels:

Our physical intuitions are Galilean, not classical, mechanics (that is, they are non-Newtonian). For example, our intuitions tell us that an object set in motion eventually slows down and stops. That's Galilean (also termed "folk physics" or "naive physics", usually by cognitive scientists).

Most of us had to study formal physics to advance to Newtonian classical mechanics.

Quantum mechanics (QM) is completely non-intuitive, at least as far as intuition about either folk physics or Newtonian classical physics is concerned. IIRC Feynmann says as much in his book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", Chapter 28 beginning:

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. —Richard Feynman

The quantum theory is not explicable in commonsense terms..."

Of course Feynman used his real-world physical intuition all the way through to his most abstract work. In one case he characterised the internal structure of the proton as being like "marbles inside a tin can." Try and write those equations!

[jessriedel]

There's a lot wrong with what you wrote, but the most glaring is your use of the term "Galilean mechanics".

> Galilean invariance or Galilean relativity states that the laws of motion are the same in all inertial frames. Galileo Galilei first described this principle in 1632 in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems using the example of a ship travelling at constant velocity, without rocking, on a smooth sea; any observer doing experiments below the deck would not be able to tell whether the ship was moving or stationary.

> the term Galilean invariance today usually refers to this principle as applied to Newtonian mechanics, that is, Newton's laws hold in all inertial frames.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance

[wyager]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; you're absolutely right that, intuitively, humans seem to understand physics in a Aristotelian manner. It's quite obvious why; Aristotelian physics is an efficiently computable approximation of real physics that works OK for caveman level technology on earth.

This is very similar to how scientists for a long time believed in classical Newtonian mechanics, because it's a reasonable approximation of the truth at large scales and low velocities.

[jessriedel]

His comment has technical errors, but more importantly it just doesn't address the parent's argument. It's a non sequitur.

[noobermin]

I think you're calling Aristotelian physics "Galilean mechanics."

[jivardo_nucci]

You're right, my bad! I should have said "Aristotelian mechanics" instead of "Galilean mechanics". Galileo saw his physical intuitions but, being the scientist he was, corrected them.

[noobermin]

There is a way to use physical intuition in QM too, although it obviously isn't the physical kind (tables and flipping them over). It tends to be mathematical, but it certainly isn't rigorous chugging through equations. The canonical example of this are the test questions you see in undergraduate QM courses that show you a space potential graph then ask you sketch the wavefunction in different regions. You have to have an idea what a wavefunction does in certain regions, oscillate? decay? how many nodes, etc.

[reagency]

I can sketch you a graph of (x-1)(x-2)(x-3)(x-4), but it isn't because of intuition. It is because I know how to measure key characteristics of a polynomial (roots and asymptotes) and can smoothly interpolate (simple interpolation is maybe intuitive)

[noobermin]

Sure, but I'm not sure how that is related. What I'm essentially talking about is you have a DE that is of the form -i h\phi_t -b\phi_{xx} + V(x)\phi = 0 and graphing \phi as you vary V(x). That is not obvious unless you know how solutions of the equation behave for different simple cases of V(x) and continuity. That, I argue, is intuition.

Actually, what you mentioned sounds like intuition to me. You didn't make hand plot the polynomial, so that is relying on intuition over rigour, which I think is what the OP's quote from Feynman referred to.