Is Quantum Intuition Possible?

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.

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.

The work of Couder et al. on oil droplets might show a way for more of a "quantum intuition". It's a pity that the article does not mention this work.

See eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356

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.

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).

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.

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

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/

"this physical intuition kicks in as early as two and a half months, and vanMarle and her colleagues think that it is probably present from birth.".

Does someone has any idea why they believe it is innate?

Isn't this intuition math?

E.g., the uncertainty principle is intuitive once you understand the math behind waves.

why can't one look at the creation of CPUs. It can be used to show how quantum mechanics are affecting objects that we're trying to make.