How come its possible to Understand General Relativity but not Quantum mechanics?

Question

note what Niels Bohr stated about Understanding quantum mechanics.

Answer 1

General relativity is still classical in the sense that everything is smooth and continuous. "Mass" in GR conforms to your macroscopic picture of what matter is like. It doesn't ever interpenetrate as waves do in quantum mechanics.

I think the big difficulty many people have with QM is just this "wave/particle duality" which leads to the probabilistic interpretation of the "wave function." But there is no reason why elementary particles should behave like baseballs, and they just don't seem to. They behave more like light, which has both particle and wave aspects.

Answer 2

General relativity can be explained in everyday terms. Those of us who have got used to the idea that the Earth is round, are already familiar with curved space. It's just taking that concept a little further.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, shakes some much more fundamental parts of our intuitive understanding of the World. Think of the thought experiment called "Schrodinger's cat". It's about a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time, and only becomes 100% dead or 100% alive when somebody observes it. It does not mean that it's in coma or brain-dead or something, it literally means a super-position of two radically different states of the cat. Not does it mean that we don't know if it's dead or alive, it really means that it's both simultaneously. While real cats (fortunately!) don't behave like this, you have to accept that real sub-atomar particles do, if you want to understand quantum mechanics. And that's difficult.

Answer 3

It wasn't possible to understand General Relativity before someone made a unified and complete theory about it. Once this happens with Quantum Mechanics, it will become "possible" to understand.

Answer 4

well, probabaly because u don't have the talent for Quantum mechanics.

Answer 5

the "M" theory comes close!