The attraction (and fear) of a counterintuitive world

摘要

I had a solid geometry teacher in high school who, when looking at a particular theorem, liked to say, “It’s intuitively obvious.” In college I heard that same phrase from a professor teaching electrodynamics. And when I taught in college a colleague of mine liked to tell his students that the laws of physics were “intuitively obvious.” Often our intuition can lead us to the right conclusion. But often not. And what may be intuitively obvious to a seasoned physics teacher might not be so to a student. I believe it is important to consider how this affects a student’s attitude towards the study of physics.