o physics [may seem] kind of abstract, but physics actually isn’t abstract. Albert Einstein once said that the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. And this is especially true with physics. We experience physics daily — every day that we’re alive — and our minds are constantly storing information about how the world works. And this information makes up our intuition. Our intuition is information that we know without having to consciously think about it.

And here’s one way that our intuition can agree with physics. There’s nothing in my hands, my hands are both empty, and then I do this — pull a scarf apparently out of nowhere — and immediately in our minds, something tells you that this couldn’t happen, that scarf had to come from somewhere! There’s a law of physics that describes this — it’s called the law of conservation of matter — and it states that matter cannot spontaneously appear and disappear, unless the amount of matter in the universe remains a constant. So what I was doing when I pulled the scarf out of nowhere — maybe you saw it was in my sleeve, actually — was violating that law of physics, and subconsciously, you knew that! How did you know it? It’s because every experience that you’ve had in your life tells you that things just don’t appear. And that’s your intuition telling you what was actually going on.

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ut I’m now going to explain a few ways that physics can also defy intuition. If we were examining the motion of objects in the world, we might conclude after observing enough situations that all objects in motion will eventually come to rest. This agrees with what we see every day. If we were to roll a ball across the floor, it would eventually come to a stop. And when you’re driving a car, if you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, the car will also eventually roll to a halt. You might even go so far as to say that this is a law of physics — and Galileo did just that; he stated that all objects in motion will eventually come to a halt.

Yet this actually isn’t how the world works! Isaac Newton corrected Galileo’s law and said that all objects in motion will remain in motion unless they’re acted upon by an outside force. And when we look closer at the situations — say, the ball rolling on the floor — we have to look at why the ball is coming to a halt. It’s more than likely because of the force of friction between the ball and the carpet, or the force of air resistance, and if we take away all these outside forces, the ball will in fact keep on rolling. So the point is that what we see isn’t always a clear picture of reality. We can’t always go by what we experience in the real world to tell us accurate information about how physics works.

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hese] are ways that physics can defy intuition on the macroscopic scale — that is, the scale that we experience life on every day. But physics can also defy intuition in other ways. And it does so mainly in the branch of physics called quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the type of physics that deals with the interaction of matter and energy on their smallest scales.

One of the fundamental ideas of quantum mechanics is that all matter existed as “m”s. The origin of the idea of the atom dates back to the time of ancient Greece, when a philosopher named Democratus came up with a thought experiment. He said that if you were to take a piece of matter — say, a block of wood — and cut it in half, then take one of those halves and cut it in half and keep doing this, eventually you’d reach a point where you couldn’t cut the matter in half again. And at this point you would have found the atom. This would be the smallest form of matter. And Democratus envisioned the atom as tiny spherical particles, but his idea was ignored, mostly due to opposing views of other philosophers.

. . . There were other developments in the model of the atom, but all of these require the concepts of quantum mechanics, which in itself was becoming a new popular science at the same time, while the idea of the atom was changing. One of the fundamental ideas of quantum mechanics is that of all energy existing in discrete bits, rather than continuously. This idea dates back to just before the turn of the 20th century, when physicists were having trouble describing how energy was emitted by matter, namely atoms. Their equations all said that when matter was disturbed it would emit energy, and the equations said there would be an infinite amount of energy, which we know can’t be true.

So Max Planck, a physicist, solved this problem by stating that instead of energy existing as a continuous wave, it existed only in discrete chunks — little tiny bits that he called quanta. This goes against what we see in the everyday world, because when we shine a beam of light — which is electromagnetic energy — we see a solid beam, no breaks or gaps in it, as we would expect to see if it consisted of just chunks. But if these chunks were small enough, we wouldn’t notice the fact that there were gaps in the light — it would just appear continuous to us. So this idea fixed the problems the scientists were having with the emission of energy by matter.

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ith these experiments, I’ve shown that what we see in the world, and what our intuition tells us should be true, isn’t always correct. Much of quantum mechanics defies intuition, but much of other theories of physics doesn’t defy intuition, it agrees with it.

So why is our intuition accurate sometimes but not others? It’s all because our intuition comes from what we experience, and since we never experience the world on the quantum level, we have no basis for judging what should happen due to the laws of quantum mechanics. In other areas — such as the example of objects appearing to always come to a rest — we have to examine them closer to find out what’s really going on.

In short, what we perceive in the real world, we can’t really rely on, because our perception most of the time is inaccurate, and we have to investigate further to find out what’s really going on. I think it’s important to explore physics and keep on learning why the world works as it does, because through that we can gain a better understanding of the world and how it was designed.