I see the point of the post, but it's too harsh. Naive physics (like folk etymology) is important, a facet of the human mind worth studying and paying attention to. It should be overcome, but it can't be replaced by some higher form of intuition. No one can force themselves (him/herself?) to intuit quantum physics. Naive physics can and should be superseded by real physics, but our original intuitions remain intact. The two forms of understanding can live side by side, each with its proper function. Reminded me of a recent piece by Chomsky. Excerpt:
Descartes had been able to formulate a relatively clear mind-body problem: it arose because he observed phenomena that, he plausibly argued, could not be accounted for in terms of automata. He was proven wrong, for reasons he could never have guessed: nothing can be accounted for within the mechanical philosophy, even the simplest terrestrial and planetary motion. Newton established, to his great dismay, thata purely materialistic or mechanistic physics . . . is impossible'' (Koyre 1957:210). Newton was bitterly criticized by leading scientists of his day for reverting to the mysticism from which we were at last to be liberated by the scientific revolution. He was condemned for reintroducingoccult qualities'' that are no different from the mysterioussympathies'' andantipathies'' of the neoscholastic Aristotelian physicists, which were much ridiculed. Newton agreed. He regarded his discoveries as an utterabsurdity,'' and for the rest of his life sought some way around them: he kept searching for acertain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies,'' and would account for motion, interaction, electrical attraction and repulsion, properties of light, sensation, and the ways in whichmembers of animal bodies move at the command of the will'' - comparable mysteries, he felt. Similar efforts continued for centuries, but always in vain. The absurdity was real, and simply had to be accepted. In a sense it was overcome in this century, but only by introducing what Newton and his contemporaries would have regarded as even greater absurdities. We are left with theadmission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable `facts' imposed upon us by empiricism'' (Koyre 1957:272). Well before Priestley, David Hume wrote thatNewton seemed to draw to the veil from some of the mysteries of nature,'' buthe shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature's] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain'' (Hume [1778] 1983:542). The world is simply not comprehensible to human intelligence, at least in the ways that early modern science had hoped and expected. In his classic study of the history of materialism, Friedrich Lange observes that their expectations and goals were abandoned, and we graduallyaccustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension.'' Lange describes this as aturning-point'' in the history of materialism that removes the surviving remnants of the doctrine far from those of the ``genuine Materialists'' of the seventeenth century, and deprives them of much significance (Lange 1925:308). The turning point also led gradually to a much weaker concept of intelligibility than the one that inspired the modern scientific revolution: intelligibility of theories, not of the world - a considerable difference, which may well bring into operation different faculties of mind, a topic some day for cognitive science, perhaps. - Linguistics and Brain Science, in A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita and W. O'Neil (eds.) Image, Language and Brain (MIT Press, 2000).
Whenever I hear someone describe quantum physics as "weird" - whenever I hear someone bewailing the mysterious effects of observation on the observed, or the bizarre existence of nonlocal correlations, or the incredible impossibility of knowing position and momentum at the same time - then I think to myself: This person will never understand physics no matter how many books they read.
Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don't go calling it nasty names like "bizarre" or "incredible". The universe was propagating complex amplitudes through configuration space for ten billion years before life ever emerged on Earth. Quantum physics is not "weird". You are weird. You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly normal cloud of complex amplitude in configuration space. This is your problem, not reality's, and you are the one who needs to change.
Human intuitions were produced by evolution and evolution is a hack. The same optimization process that built your retina backward and then routed the optic cable through your field of vision, also designed your visual system to process persistent objects bouncing around in 3 spatial dimensions because that's what it took to chase down tigers. But "tigers" are leaky surface generalizations - tigers came into existence gradually over evolutionary time, and they are not all absolutely similar to each other. When you go down to the fundamental level, the level on which the laws are stable, global, and exception-free, there aren't any tigers. In fact there aren't any persistent objects bouncing around in 3 spatial dimensions. Deal with it.
Calling reality "weird" keeps you inside a viewpoint already proven erroneous. Probability theory tells us that surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis; if a model is consistently stupid - consistently hits on events the model assigns tiny probabilities - then it's time to discard that model. A good model makes reality look normal, not weird; a good model assigns high probability to that which is actually the case. Intuition is only a model by another name: poor intuitions are shocked by reality, good intuitions make reality feel natural. You want to reshape your intuitions so that the universe looks normal. You want to think like reality.
This end state cannot be forced. It is pointless to pretend that quantum physics feels natural to you when in fact it feels strange. This is merely denying your confusion, not becoming less confused. But it will also hinder you to keep thinking How bizarre! Spending emotional energy on incredulity wastes time you could be using to update. It repeatedly throws you back into the frame of the old, wrong viewpoint. It feeds your sense of righteous indignation at reality daring to contradict you.
The principle extends beyond physics. Have you ever caught yourself saying something like, "I just don't understand how a PhD physicist can believe in astrology?" Well, if you literally don't understand, this indicates a problem with your model of human psychology. Perhaps you are indignant - you wish to express strong moral disapproval. But if you literally don't understand, then your indignation is stopping you from coming to terms with reality. It shouldn't be hard to imagine how a PhD physicist ends up believing in astrology. People compartmentalize, enough said.
I now try to avoid using the English idiom "I just don't understand how..." to express indignation. If I genuinely don't understand how, then my model is being surprised by the facts, and I should discard it and find a better model.
Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts. Likewise for facts called such nasty names as "bizarre", "incredible", "unbelievable", "unexpected", "strange", "anomalous", or "weird". When you find yourself tempted by such labels, it may be wise to check if the alleged fact is really factual. But if the fact checks out, then the problem isn't the fact, it's you.