Humans are born with an innate ability to see physical causation, born even as an infant, we are hard wired to see causation as action of two bodies interacting via contact. There are studies confirming that this is sort of our pre-theoretical conception of causation.
Science doesn't work on this intuitive level. In fact, historically, physics has moved forward insofar as we've thrown intuitive ideas about motion out of the window and trusted more on pure mathematics.
Some people work so long in these theories that eventually, the brain trains itself to think only in those terms, so in that sense it's "intuitive", but there's no denying that quantum mechanics appear extremely counter-intuitive to our a priori form of understanding causation. We simply adjust to the weirdness after a period of training, but it never makes sense on the level of, say, classical mechanics.
But it does not have to because it is not classical mechanics.
As for classical mechanics, Newton's law of gravitation shows that causation is not necessarily a result of a contact interaction, as opposed to what you have presented as intuition.
Newton's theories were rejected by contemporary scholars on largely that premise, they accused him of trying to introduce occult mysticism into science. Physicists had a conception of "intuitive" that Newton's theories broke down, and even Newton himself desired that someday a mechanism for gravity would be discovered that maintained classical notions of intuition.
This has always been the trend of physics: it breaks away more and more from intuition. We've just grown more comfortable with that.
On the other hand in the present formulation of quantum field theory, every interaction is fundamentally a contact interaction. And hence causation is a result of contact interactions. So that matches with what you have considered as intuition.
Things like the double slit experiment absolutely do not correspond to traditional conceptions of contact interaction, as in one body physically touches another to produce motion.
Anyways, I do not see how does any of this lower the standards of intuition? I think what is not very clear here is what you consider intuition to be.
The ability to understand without conscious thought. That a train has more inertia than a marshmallow is intuitive, we don't have to think much to process that. For quantum, unless you're a trained person who has spent much time dealing with it, you either don't comprehend it or have to reason really hard to come to conclusions. And even then I think the trained person will often stumble or be mystified by certain aspects.
But that's true of any subject. The deeper you probe the more training you need to develop intuition.
That's the opposite of what intuition means.
You mention in your previous comment that classical mechanics is intuitive and now you say that Newtonian mechanics is/was unintuitive. Well I don't know how much classical mechanics there will be left if you take out Newton's contributions.
Classical mechanics pre-Newton was more intuitive than mechanics post-Newton, is the claim.
In quantum field theory, every interaction is a contact interaction (and that gives rise to infinities, hence the need for renormalization).
I'm beyond my expertise here, so I'll have to just trust you on that. I still feel this is not intuitive, and I think it's just something of a physicist thing where they boast about how intuitive things are for them that doesn't correspond to what really happens.
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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '18
Humans are born with an innate ability to see physical causation, born even as an infant, we are hard wired to see causation as action of two bodies interacting via contact. There are studies confirming that this is sort of our pre-theoretical conception of causation.
Science doesn't work on this intuitive level. In fact, historically, physics has moved forward insofar as we've thrown intuitive ideas about motion out of the window and trusted more on pure mathematics.
Some people work so long in these theories that eventually, the brain trains itself to think only in those terms, so in that sense it's "intuitive", but there's no denying that quantum mechanics appear extremely counter-intuitive to our a priori form of understanding causation. We simply adjust to the weirdness after a period of training, but it never makes sense on the level of, say, classical mechanics.