this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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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.