JimC;234687 Wrote: 
> My cousin is a professor and research physicist at Stanford, working on
> the SLA.  I'm a pretty smart guy by most measures of intelligence and
> can hold my own with him on a wide variety of topics.  I once asked him
> if he could explain QM to me.
> 

I probably know him.

I think the thing to remember here is what Darwin taught us.  Our
ancestors had to have a very good intuition for human-scale classical
mechanics - like predicting the trajectory of a rock through the air. 
If they didn't they died.  And in fact we're really, really good at
that (think baseball).  But there's no reason we should have a good
intuition for anything else, and in general we just don't.  

Physics is weird and non-intuitive, and the only way to understand it
is to approach is carefully, systematically, and mathematically.  It's
very difficult to communicate it to a lay audience without simplifying
it to the point of basically lying.  I'm actually going to be giving a
series of public lectures soon, so I'm thinking about how to do this
quite a bit - it's hard!


-- 
opaqueice
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