The Stupidity of Intuition

I think if there's one lesson the science of physics has taught us, it's that the world--quite rightly--doesn't give a damn about what we think about it. We can complain all we like that, for example, the suggestion of quantum mechanics according to which things can be at multiple places at the same time doesn't make sense, that it's counter-intuitive, and that therefore God couldn't have designed the world that way, but it's not going to make an ounce of difference. We might as well moan about the Earth not being flat or at the centre of the Universe.

The progress of physics, in fact, has been a gradual un-learning of our intuitions about the world, which have proven to be of precious little help in understanding what is really going on. The Ancient Greeks thought, for example, that the default state of things was standing still, and constant power or energy was needed to keep objects in motion. Ultimately it took Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and the invention of the telescope and calculus for us to accept that the presence of friction, which stops things here on Earth, is the special thing, and the universal default is what stars and planets do: to be in motion.

Why is it so surprising, then, when we learn that the well-localised nature of macroscopic objects is the special thing, an approximation, and the real world is more like all the strange stuff quantum mechanics teaches us, with superpositions, uncertainties, clocks running at different speeds, and photons seemingly talking to each other faster than the speed of light? It is much more likely--and much more interesting--that the world be this way, than if it was governed by the closed, deterministic, classical laws of mechanics. Still, even if it is quantum mechanical, or something else altogether, one thing is for sure: the world doesn't care about Maxwell's laws, or de Broglie, or Lorentz, or Susskind. It will continue to be the way it is no matter what we think it should be like. Eppur si muove.

(Except of course for the fact that if we have an idea about what it should be like, that is expressed by particles in the neurons in our brains, and that configuration is part of the world, so the world, strictly speaking, changes with each thought. In a sense, what we think about the world not only changes it, but it is the world, for that is what we think we experience.)