this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Most of school going humans are aware of the concept of force and motion.
We have vague ideas of the laws that govern them roughly 400 years after their discovery by Newton.
On the basis of that, one can form a rough estimate that it would take humans another 30-40 years to assimilate quantum mechanics and special relativity.
No you can't, because Special Relatively and Quantum Mechanics are inherently more complicated and harder to learn.
what would you estimate the time to be ? For school going people.
We can see the relationships between forces and motion in our everyday lives so we naturally internalise a model of how they work. Newton didn’t actually ‘discover’ the force of gravity, for example, he developed calculus to be able to extrapolate out from the force we see when we drop something on Earth to the planets themselves.
Quantum mechanics is completely different, there is nothing we see in our everyday lives which allows us to naturally build up a mental model of how quarks interact, or the way that photons propagate. It is only through dedicated study, a solid grasp of very advanced maths, and painstaking experimentation that we can figure out how those things work.
So I don’t think school going people will ever have the same inherent understanding of it that we do of forces like gravity.