The Intuitive Understanding of Physics

Source: https://modernfamily.fandom.com/

In the “Punkin Chunkin” episode of Modern Family, when the pumpkin fails to land as far as the non-Pritchett gang wants, Claire Dunphy, who was described as a “marketing major from a clown college” by Phil Dunphy, says “knock knock, who’s there? Physics!”. Seems odd that she’d know enough about physics.

It also seems odd when people look at Rohit Shetty’s films and say that the scenes defy the laws of physics. Do all the people who comment on the absurdity of these scenes know Newton’s equations well? I highly doubt it.

In the movie Inception, Mall and Cobb know their totem intricately. They don’t know their totem’s angular momentum, its moment of intertia or its center of mass. Yet, they know how it spins, they know the look and feel, and they know how it falls.

Source: https://inception.fandom.com/

In his book Alchemy, the legendary marketer Rory Sutherland talks about how we have been washing our hands and bodies before we knew about germs and pathogens. We have an intuitive and empirical understanding of how cleanliness keeps us healthy.

I like to think that the intuitive understanding of classical Newtonian physics is somewhat similar. Just by looking and feeling objects, we have a sense of how they will move, fall and behave.

That’s why all hell breaks lose when we switch to quantum physics when the intuitive understanding has to bow down to the might of mathematics.