Comment by gus_massa
13 hours ago
>> Specifically, I focused on the equivalence principle—a key axiom that Einstein formulated through thought experiments grounded in his physical intuition.
It's weird because the equivalence principle is very unintuitive. Aristotle's Mechanics does not have it. It took almost two thousand years to discover inertia that is the most simple version of the equivalence principle. Einstein understood the idea of the the equivalence principle because he had a physics degree, not because he feel that in real life.
Moreover, if you ever have to study or teach Quantum Mechanics, physical intuition gets in the way. A lot of properties contradict the physical intuition but after a while you get use to them. If we continue with Einstein, the photoelectric effect does not aperar in real life.
> If we continue with Einstein, the photoelectric effect does not aperar in real life.
Of course it does. How do you think your phone camera works?
But he didn't have one :) I guess unless you use the raw images, I think the cameras fix a lot of the noise caused by the Poisson distribution. I imagine a movie where Einstein get bored in the patent office and decide to open a photography shop, perhaps with very grainy underexposed photography is possible to notice the quantization of photons, and then he gets a Nobel prize.
Another bad idea for a movie is a watermillpunk universe, where during a practice on a hot day the best ever curling player discover inercia.
That’s funny, when I first learned about the equivalence principle, my first thought was “of course!” I have always found it to be very intuitive. The great leap is being able to frame it that way.
I worked on the early iPod scroll wheel, before there were advertisements for it and it was in common use. I found the UI interaction odd and unintuitive, particularly the "menu" button and the dead end you hit when "playing". Of course by the time the demonstrator ads came out and everyone was talking about how easy it was use, I'd already spent 10s of hours on it, and it WAS second nature. Being first and embedded in the culture of the time has huge UI advantages.
(Note that the HP Chipmunk 9836 also had a scroll selector wheel in 84)
Most people are UI bigots. Once they get used to a first something, they expect everything to work that way and hate learning anew. They get stuck on keyboards, mice, trackpoint nubs, trackpads, trackballs, scroll wheels, or touchscreens and refuse to move on. Of course there are 'objective' performance tests for each including Fitt's test of accuracy and latency, as well as, cognitive load. I guess once you have a hammer, every screw looks like a nail.
So I'd be a bit careful with the "of course!". It may well be obvious only because that is the first mental model you latch onto.