Jason Kuznicki misses my point completely:
How Not to Read with Charity — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: Brad DeLong is a seemingly limitless source of uncharitable readings. He doesn’t disappoint in his latest:
First, let’s not tell Jason that the Theory of Relativity is the easy, straightforward, intuitive branch of modern physics...
Let’s not tell the economist that physicists disagree with him. It really is hard...
My point is not that Relativity is easy, intuitive, and consonant with everyday human experience.
My point is that Relativity is easy, intuitive, and consonant with every day human experience when compared to Quantum Mechanics, which is the other branch of twentieth-century physics. Quantum Mechanics is genuinely mind-bending, is genuinely incomprehensible in a way that Relativity is not. It is so incomprehensinblr that physicists' standard advice to their students when they try to make sense of Quantum Mechanics is that they should stop: instead they should just "shut up and calculate."
As Richard Feynman used to like to say:
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school.... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it.... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does...
