Nick Szabo  🔑

If a theory consists of a set of assumptions and their logical implications, not sure about the claim being made here that physicists don't understand their own theory. Would a physicist out there care to explain?https://twitter.com/MarkThoma/status/1172675666463969280 …

Their math is fine, but the metaphors they use to describe the math are awful. For example, you & I think of a "particle" as something like a grain of sand. At quantum scales what physicists call "particles" bear next to no resemblance to a-grain-of-sand-only-far-smaller.

So the author of this article is confused by bad metaphors?

We all are. Not easy to fix. We understand new things (in the sense Feynman and this author use "understand") by comparing them to macro-scale objects that our brains are evolved to grasp or that we learned from direct sensory experience. Quantum very hard to compare to such.

An [implicitly particle-like] "object" "being" at at "one of various locations" is poor simile. My description: a wave made out of nothing-yet, a ghostly 3D roulette wheel that generates a pointlike event that instantaneously turns into another such nothing-yet-roulette-wave.

Other concepts that confuse: • spin • Higgs field is 'molasses' • the description of energy as 'kinetic' 'potential' 'chemical' etc. when energy is just work in all cases ...several more...