Comment by ajkjk

Well, I don't agree. Maybe you are talking about how people's intuition initially breaks on the double-split experiment, or spinors, or whatever else? But I'm not talking about broken macroscopic intuition failing on quantum systems. Of course that doesn't work. There is a separate "quantum" intuition that you get over time which lets you make true inferences. Surely you have a bunch of it if you've got a PhD in this stuff.

Things like: if you think of particles as blobs of mass and charge, you get the wrong answers; if you think of them as interfering waves then you start to get right answers. If you think of them as interfering light waves, you get the right answer for a while until you hit a situation where spin=1 gives the wrong answer, or m≠0 means the transverse component is nonzero, so you fix your intuition on that and get better answers. If you think of particle-waves as discrete atomic objects you can't intuit how different particles can be created in scattering; if you think of them as a label given to a particular vector which can be decomposed as a sum of other vectors which interact differently with different fields then you can see how particle creation/annihilation works.

Etc. There certainly are models you can construct in your mind that make this stuff start to make sense. I don't have them all, but I'm working on it. Mindlessly doing math might work for homework problems but it's not enough for actually explaining anything; you need some mental picture of what's going on as well. But the math is always there to make your intuitions concrete and keep them grounded in reality.