Natural Science Forum / Physics / Relativity / January 2007

Actually nothing makes sense. The fact that the universe as such is
not given to us directly and instead we have to resign ourselves to
some intellectual contortions is truly beyond ridiculous.

--
Jan Bielawski

Actually -- and this is an important point -- physics is not about
making intuitive sense of the way the world works. Our intuitive sense
is tied to our sensibilities in our confined perspective of the
universe, where scales are much larger than the Planck constant and
speeds are much lower than c. It's sort of like trying to make sense
of Asian culture by tying it to your upbringing in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama.

Physics has long abandoned the need to form a *conceptual* picture of
underlying reality, because the underlying reality turns out to be so
foreign to our conceptual framework.

Instead, physics has had to settle for a *predictive* framework which
accurately predicts observable behavior in an organized way. It turns
out that this framework uses a lot of mathematics as a tool. The key
thing, however, is that the results from the framework are compared
directly with *experiment*. It turns out that Einstein was wrong about
quantum mechanics. He was instrumental (along with Podolsky and Rosen)
in formulating the key question that would demonstrate whether he was
right or he was wrong. When the experiment was actually done, he lost
the bet.

It is the mark of a terrific physicist that, when the results don't
make any sense but they're staring you right in the face, he will
question what he thought was good sense.

It's a shame it can't be more conceptual, more intuitive, more
sensible, but nature doesn't care what makes sense to us. It is what
it is, and we have to apply whatever tools *work* to be able to
reliably *use* nature to our purposes, even if those tools are
divorced from a solid conceptual foundation.

PD

Whether it makes no sense is irrelevent.  It's the most successful
physical theory ever constructed.  True, math is not physics,  but
math is the language of physics.  Get used to it.