@Krumple,
Krumple wrote:Its because Dale is an armchair physicist.
Something that may not be intuitive to a layman may be inituitive to a particle physicist or mathematician.
Interesting article on Wikipedia about "naïve physics" -
Quote:Some examples of naïve physics include commonly understood, intuitive, or everyday-observed rules of nature:
What goes up must come down
A dropped object falls straight down
A solid object cannot pass through another solid object
A vacuum sucks things towards it
An object is either at rest or moving, in an absolute sense
Two events are either simultaneous or they are not
Many of these and similar ideas formed the basis for the first works in formulating and systematizing physics by Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in Western civilization. In the modern science of physics, they were gradually contradicted by the work of Galileo, Newton, and others. The idea of absolute simultaneity survived until 1905, when the special theory of relativity and its supporting experiments discredited it.
And counter intuition...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterintuitive
Quote:examples are:
In science:
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - for thousands of years, it was confidently assumed that arithmetic, and therefore similar systems of logic, were completely solid in terms of being reliable for deductions. Gödel proved that such systems could not be both complete and consistent.
Wave–particle duality / photoelectric effect - As demonstrated by the double slit experiment light and quantum particles behave as both waves and particles.
A significant number of people find it difficult to accept the mathematical fact that 0.999... equals 1.[5][6]
The Monty Hall problem* poses a simple yes-or-no question from probability that even professionals can find difficult to reconcile with their intuition.
Horseshoe orbits in orbital mechanics
That light may pass through two perpendicularly oriented polarizing filters if a third filter, not oriented perpendicular to either of the other two, is placed between them.[7]
The Mpemba effect, in which, under certain circumstances, a warmer body of water will freeze faster than a cooler body in the same environment.
That water vapor is lighter than air and is the reason clouds float and barometers work.[8]
In politics and economics:
The violation of the monotonicity criterion in voting systems
David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage that suggests that comparative advantage is in general more important than absolute advantage
Many examples of cognitive bias, such as:
The clustering illusion that suggests that significant patterns exist in a set of random points when no other cause than chance is present
That alignments of random points on a plane are vastly easier to find than intuition would suggest
*The Monty Hall problem is a counter-intuitive statistics puzzle:
There are 3 doors, behind which are two goats and a car.
You mentally pick a door (call it door 1), but don't open it yet.
Monty Hall, the game show host, examines the other doors (2 & 3) and always opens one of them with a goat (Both doors might have goats; he’ll randomly pick one to open)
Your choice: Do you stick with door 1 (original guess) or switch to the other unopened door? Does it matter?
Answer: the odds aren’t 50-50. If you switch doors you’ll win 2/3 of the time. Many people have had trouble getting this, including eminent mathematicians. Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced until he was shown a computer simulation demonstrating the predicted result.
