There’s a widespread belief that quantum mechanics is supposed to be confusing. This is not a good frame of mind for either a teacher or a student.

And I find that legendarily “confusing” subjects often are not really all that complicated as math, particularly if you just want a very basic—but still mathematical—grasp on what goes on down there.

I am not a physicist, and physicists famously hate it when non-professional-physicists talk about quantum mechanics. But I do have some experience with explaining mathy things that are allegedly “hard to understand.”

I wrote the Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning because people were complaining that Bayes’s Theorem was “counterintuitive”—in fact it was famously counterintuitive—and this did not seem right. The equation just did not seem complicated enough to deserve the fearsome reputation it had. So I tried explaining it my way, and I did not manage to reach my original target of elementary school students, but I get frequent grateful emails from formerly confused folks ranging from reporters to outside academic college professors.

Besides, as a Bayesian, I don’t believe in phenomena that are inherently confusing. Confusion exists in our models of the world, not in the world itself. If a subject is widely known as confusing, not just difficult… you shouldn’t leave it at that. It doesn’t satisfice; it is not an okay place to be. Maybe you can fix the problem, maybe you can’t; but you shouldn’t be happy to leave students confused.

The first way in which my introduction is going to depart from the traditional, standard introduction to quantum mechanics, is that I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is supposed to be confusing.

I am not going to tell you that it’s okay for you to not understand quantum mechanics, because no one understands quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman once claimed. There was a historical time when this was true, but we no longer live in that era.

I am not going to tell you: “You don’t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it.” (As von Neumann is reputed to have said; back in the dark decades when, in fact, no one did understand quantum mechanics.)

Explanations are supposed to make you less confused. If you feel like you don’t understand something, this indicates a problem—either with you, or your teacher—but at any rate a problem; and you should move to resolve...

Alon Lavie

Alon Lavie

Alon Lavie

Alon Lavie