Desrtopa comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (375)
Both of them were pretty good at explaining things, as scientists went, but this is a serious exaggeration as far as the actual comprehensibility of the theories goes. The six most accessible chapters from the Feynman Lectures on Physics, republished separately as Six Easy Pieces, are still way over the head of an ordinary six year old, and the Theory of Relativity was famously little understood in its time. I recall reading one anecdote by a contemporary where he says that he spent several days with Einstein, and every day Einstein tried to explain the theory to him. He said that by the end of it, he still couldn't make head or tails of it but was convinced Einstein knew what he was talking about.
Some theories in physics today are genuinely very difficult to understand, and take a lot of focused study to make sense of. I was accounted a pretty promising student in physics, and dropped the subject after a year in college, and a lot of stuff was still way over my head by the time I switched tracks. But the reason they actually believe these theories, and consider them theories rather than simply conjectures, is that they're very well supported by evidence. They're unintuitive and hard to understand, but it appears that they're actually true regardless.
Human beings never faced evolutionary selection pressure towards being able to understand the most fundamental workings of reality. There's no particular reason they should be easy for us to understand.