Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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You can't have them. They don't exist.

Quantum mechanics does not match anything in your intuitive world. If you look at the mathematics, you'll see why: there are terms in the mathematics that don't appear anywhere else in the world.

At best, you'll draw analogies like the Fourier transform. If you understand signal analysis, you've got a better shot at understanding quantum mechanics. But that's getting further away from your daily experience, not nearer.

If you work with the math, we can explain why your daily experience is so different from the quantum world. You'd be able to see why a lot of quantum mechanics, all added together, behaves like a classical object, even though the actual truth of each individual particle is still quantum mechanical. It's not unlike any other statistical phenomenon: the average of rolling two dice will always be very close to 7, even though your first few rolls may well be as low as 2 or as big as 12.

That's why you can derive your intuitions from quantum mechanics, but not the other way around. Your intuitions, in a strict physical sense, are just plain wrong, and no amount of explanation will ever make quantum mechanics work like that.

Doesn't human knowledge come from intuitions? How can we come up, as humanity, with something that's outside our combined intuition space?

I can see how different people can have different subspaces for their intuitions, therefore having access to some ideas that others don't.

This is one way in which I see math. Math can make lots of sense for the people that have these mathematical concepts inside their their intuition's space. And considering that intuition can be trained, I somehow expect to be able to understand the most complicated/complex of concepts, if they were to be mapped to my own understanding of those concepts.

The gap between intuition and science is the math. To be "science", you need some kind of formal model that takes a state as input and returns a prediction about that state in the future.

Science is most interesting when it gives you something non-intuitive. Intuition says "all things come to a rest", which was the best science did for a few thousand years. Eventually somebody ditched intuition and said, "Actually, objects in motion tend to remain in motion. You're just confused because friction is everywhere."

You can try to re-train your intuition to match, but a lot of science toys are fun because you never really achieve that. Think about the Newton's Cradle toy, with the clacking hanging balls. The math is simple, but it's fun because it's nonetheless surprising.

If you work with the formulas long enough, you can see the patterns and re-train your expectations. Weird games like the Quantum Eraser are old hat to physicists, who are not surprised by the results -- but only because they've worked with the math enough to see where the formulas go. Their intuition never really trains itself to expect that in daily life, because daily life never works like that.

They can go from the formulas to expectations of experiments, but not the other way around, because the experiments are so unlike daily life. There's nothing to compare it to. It's hard enough with slightly unexpected phenomena like the Newton's Cradle; it's impossible with things that are truly outside of anybody's experience ever.

Disclaimer: what I mean by "the space of humanity's intuition" can be bigger than the sum of the separate intuitions of each person.

Still, I don't see why someone could not extend their intuition space to include any concept. Especially because the "intuition world" or "intuition space" doesn't really seem like the kind of think that follows real life laws of travelling through space (we could jump between understandings without going through all the intermediary points in-between)

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