Thanks for that link, I know a lot of people who do physics demonstrations. They probably will love this! (And have seen it already, but that's beside the point)
Vibrating porridge, that's how I envision quantum phenomena; particles would be the lumps in the purée.
I find that it helps thinking about liquid rather than solid media as it provides better insight for things like "spooky action at a distance", "uncertainty principle" or "probabilistic nature of the waveform", as it dispels the learned intuitions about position and speed of solids that the article speaks about.
There are "particle properties" also that need to be accounted for, and I think of those as "recognizable patterns" measured around an area of interest located where the particle position would be, rather than physical "things" or individual objects.
The same goes for relativity.
I think you will develop such intuition over time. As a biologist I have a firm grasp on what a nanometer is, how big a protein is, what to expect when I "glue" two of them together or what happens when I pour formalin over a cell.
It is extremely hard for me to talk about work to a layman who does not even know what DNA is. Try explaining that every base pairs is about 0.3 nm apart and we have about two meters of DNA, spread over 30.000 genes. What does it mean for promotor accessibility related to transcription factors? It would take some time to calculate these things but I have a pretty nice picture in my head of vibrating proteins and the chaos it is down there (Movies such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY are extremely misleading!)
I had a colleague who got the molecular structure of optically active molecules in his head when he saw the absorption and fluorescence spectra of molecules.
But try getting that into the mind of an infant who learns by doing. Would it make sense? It reminds me of a piece from the book of Woz, where he explains how significant it was for his development that his father explained the workings of a transistor by explaining the flows of electrons. It made understanding much easier for him.
I guess, when a kid is ready I won't hurt to feed her/him such information but I wouldn't teach my son that he could in theory tunnel through the wall and end up in the neighbors kitchen...
Nice topic by the way, I remember watching the quantum mechanics movies (and the relativity movies) on my Encarta CDrom (I was 12 I think) over and over and just enjoy that feeling of uneasiness, the feeling that there is another world down there.
> I have a pretty nice picture in my head of vibrating proteins and the chaos it is down there (Movies such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY are extremely misleading!)
That's really interesting, actually. In what ways are they misleading? Just... things not shaking around enough? How about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RmeDPqYUMI ?
That one looks closer to reality because the molecular movement is realistic for the (extremely short) time scale. However the system is simplified almost beyond recognition.
The movie I posted suggests a nice roomy cytoplasm while in reality it is an extremely crowded soup of insanely fast vibrating molecules. Some (many?) proteins do not even have a solid structure or attain it only when they bind something. It also suggests molecules are attracted towards each other when in fact then rely almost completely on things like concentration and Brownian motion for the interaction dynamics.
The movie does give a nice overview of processes but it is important to realize it is not the way it looks (as far as you can speak of "looking" at the molecular scale where photons interact with matter not in a way we "see" it normally, I mean, a protein is not a set of spheres, a carbon ring can absorb a photon or not, it can not bounce it back to reveal to your eye what it looks like.)
So we are dealing with models here. Models of a reality we can not really imagine. Like Quantum Mechanics.
idea: a quantum fps. By interacting within a world governed by quantum principles, you might develop an intuition. Similar to muscle memory, or training in mathematical notation.
Especially, taking a leaf out of Ender's Game, for children.
The average human needs years of training for fluent reading, writing and arithmetic.
Though, might be computationally infeasible to do with adequate accuracy; would necessarily be extraordinarily bizarre and counter-intuitive; and... might not be much fun.
Yes it is. And it is called mathematical reasoning. You don't need to have some childish intuition to grasp the tunnel effect. It is enough to understand the concept of an exponential function of complex arguments.
Complicated problems need abstract reasoning not handwavy explanations. "Imagine two rivers which merge at some point and two boats floating down these rivers. Which one will be first? Think about it and solve your race condition problem." Pure nonsense. We have powerful ways to think about programs with programming languages. For physics this language is mathematics. If you want to understand something study the language.
And bits like "Babies also intuitively grasp that objects exist even when you’re not looking at them, a concept called “object permanence” that goes against the classic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics [...]" are just sad. An observation in the physical sense and the observation of a newborn are not the same concept. Babies have a memory. Computers have memory. Therefore babies are computers.
"Newton disproved them. He showed that the world is not intelligible to us. Newton demonstrated that there are no machines, that there’s nothing mechanical in the sense in which it was assumed that the world was mechanical. He didn’t believe it — in fact he felt his work was an absurdity — but he proved it, and he spent the rest of his life trying to disprove it. And other scientists did later on. I mean, it’s often said that Newton got rid of the ghost in the machine, but it’s quite the opposite. Newton exorcised the machine. He left the ghost.
"And by the time that sank in, which was quite some time, it just changed the conception of science. Instead of trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, we recognized that it’s not intelligible to us. But we just say, ‘Well, you know, unfortunately that’s the way it works. I can’t understand it but that’s the way it works.’ And then the aim of science is reduced from trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, which it is not, to trying to show that there are theories of the world which are intelligible to us. That’s what science is: It’s the study of intelligible theories which give an explanation of some aspect of reality."
I think this basically agrees with your point on mathematics; the theory itself may be intelligible.
As an exercise, in college, a couple colleagues and me started to play 4D Tic Tac Toe. We started with a 4x4x4x4 cube on the assumption that, when the game became too easy, we'd have grasped the idea and would move to a 5x5x5x5 cube. It took us many hours of play, explanations and headaches before we could move on, but we did it.
Its a lot of work to represent it, even ias a series of 3d projections
I think that quantum physicists do get an (imperfect) intuition for it, but they can't communicate it to laypeople because the inferential distance is too high.
I also think that it takes awhile for societies to internalize these things, and to find what works pedagogically, so it's hard to say how intuitive it will end up being. For example, starting teaching with quantum computer science might be really beneficial because qubits bypass some of the difficulties (differential equations, waves vs particles, tunneling) while keeping most of the weird (superposition, entanglement, measurement, interference, counterfactuals).
This is a great idea and is the thinking behind Meqanic, which is designed to build (some) intuition about quantum physics as you go. Check it out: http://appstore.com/meqanic or http://meqanic.com/
20 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] threadSee eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356
http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964848
I find that it helps thinking about liquid rather than solid media as it provides better insight for things like "spooky action at a distance", "uncertainty principle" or "probabilistic nature of the waveform", as it dispels the learned intuitions about position and speed of solids that the article speaks about.
There are "particle properties" also that need to be accounted for, and I think of those as "recognizable patterns" measured around an area of interest located where the particle position would be, rather than physical "things" or individual objects.
It is extremely hard for me to talk about work to a layman who does not even know what DNA is. Try explaining that every base pairs is about 0.3 nm apart and we have about two meters of DNA, spread over 30.000 genes. What does it mean for promotor accessibility related to transcription factors? It would take some time to calculate these things but I have a pretty nice picture in my head of vibrating proteins and the chaos it is down there (Movies such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY are extremely misleading!)
I had a colleague who got the molecular structure of optically active molecules in his head when he saw the absorption and fluorescence spectra of molecules.
But try getting that into the mind of an infant who learns by doing. Would it make sense? It reminds me of a piece from the book of Woz, where he explains how significant it was for his development that his father explained the workings of a transistor by explaining the flows of electrons. It made understanding much easier for him.
I guess, when a kid is ready I won't hurt to feed her/him such information but I wouldn't teach my son that he could in theory tunnel through the wall and end up in the neighbors kitchen...
Nice topic by the way, I remember watching the quantum mechanics movies (and the relativity movies) on my Encarta CDrom (I was 12 I think) over and over and just enjoy that feeling of uneasiness, the feeling that there is another world down there.
That's really interesting, actually. In what ways are they misleading? Just... things not shaking around enough? How about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RmeDPqYUMI ?
The movie I posted suggests a nice roomy cytoplasm while in reality it is an extremely crowded soup of insanely fast vibrating molecules. Some (many?) proteins do not even have a solid structure or attain it only when they bind something. It also suggests molecules are attracted towards each other when in fact then rely almost completely on things like concentration and Brownian motion for the interaction dynamics.
The movie does give a nice overview of processes but it is important to realize it is not the way it looks (as far as you can speak of "looking" at the molecular scale where photons interact with matter not in a way we "see" it normally, I mean, a protein is not a set of spheres, a carbon ring can absorb a photon or not, it can not bounce it back to reveal to your eye what it looks like.) So we are dealing with models here. Models of a reality we can not really imagine. Like Quantum Mechanics.
>realize it is not the way it looks
Can you blame them? I mean adding even just the free water molecules to the first video would result in two color static music video.
Especially, taking a leaf out of Ender's Game, for children. The average human needs years of training for fluent reading, writing and arithmetic.
Though, might be computationally infeasible to do with adequate accuracy; would necessarily be extraordinarily bizarre and counter-intuitive; and... might not be much fun.
Complicated problems need abstract reasoning not handwavy explanations. "Imagine two rivers which merge at some point and two boats floating down these rivers. Which one will be first? Think about it and solve your race condition problem." Pure nonsense. We have powerful ways to think about programs with programming languages. For physics this language is mathematics. If you want to understand something study the language.
And bits like "Babies also intuitively grasp that objects exist even when you’re not looking at them, a concept called “object permanence” that goes against the classic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics [...]" are just sad. An observation in the physical sense and the observation of a newborn are not the same concept. Babies have a memory. Computers have memory. Therefore babies are computers.
"Newton disproved them. He showed that the world is not intelligible to us. Newton demonstrated that there are no machines, that there’s nothing mechanical in the sense in which it was assumed that the world was mechanical. He didn’t believe it — in fact he felt his work was an absurdity — but he proved it, and he spent the rest of his life trying to disprove it. And other scientists did later on. I mean, it’s often said that Newton got rid of the ghost in the machine, but it’s quite the opposite. Newton exorcised the machine. He left the ghost.
"And by the time that sank in, which was quite some time, it just changed the conception of science. Instead of trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, we recognized that it’s not intelligible to us. But we just say, ‘Well, you know, unfortunately that’s the way it works. I can’t understand it but that’s the way it works.’ And then the aim of science is reduced from trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, which it is not, to trying to show that there are theories of the world which are intelligible to us. That’s what science is: It’s the study of intelligible theories which give an explanation of some aspect of reality."
I think this basically agrees with your point on mathematics; the theory itself may be intelligible.
Its a lot of work to represent it, even ias a series of 3d projections
I also think that it takes awhile for societies to internalize these things, and to find what works pedagogically, so it's hard to say how intuitive it will end up being. For example, starting teaching with quantum computer science might be really beneficial because qubits bypass some of the difficulties (differential equations, waves vs particles, tunneling) while keeping most of the weird (superposition, entanglement, measurement, interference, counterfactuals).
Does someone has any idea why they believe it is innate?
E.g., the uncertainty principle is intuitive once you understand the math behind waves.