"Something happened in the twenties. For no good reason physicists stumbled upon an essentially correct description of the world--because the theory of quantum mechanics is in some sense essentially correct. It tells you how you can take dirt and make computers from it. Its the way we've leaned to manipulate our universe. It's the way chemicals are made and plastics, and what not. One knows how to compute with it. It's an extravagantly good theory--except at some level it doesn't make good sense.
"Some part of the imagery is missing. If you ask what the equations mean and whats the description of the world according to this theory, it's not a description that entails your intuitions of the world. You can't think of a particle moving as though it has a trajectory. You're not allowed to visualize it that way. If you start asking subtle questions--what does this theory tells you the world looks like?--in the end its so far out of your normal way of picturing things that you run into all sorts of conflicts. Now maybe that's the way the world really is. But you don't really know that there isn't another way of assembling all this information that doesn't demand so radical a departure from the way you intuit things.
"There's a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental. Then you presume that the other things you don't understand are the details. The assumption is that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state--this is the true analytic notion--and then somehow you put these together in more complicated ways when you want to solve more dirty problems. If you can!
"In the end to understand you have to change gears. You have to reassemble how you conceive of the important things that are going on.
"In a way art is a theory about the way the world works to human beings. Its abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me. When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there's always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff you have to put in. Or you can study horizons on Dutch ink drawings from around 1600, with tiny trees and cows that look very real. If you look closely, the trees have sort of leafy boundaries, but it doesn't work if that's all there is--there are also sticking in it little pieces of twig like stuff. There's a definite interplay between the softer textures and things with more definite lines. Somehow the combination gives the correct perception. With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There's some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.
"I truly do want to know how to describe clouds. But to say there's a piece over here with this much density--to accumulate that much detailed information, I think is wrong. It's certainly not how a human being perceives those things, and it's not how an artist perceives them. Somewhere the business of writing partial differential equations is not to have done the work on the problem.
"Somehow the wondrous promise of the universe is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them."
(Mitchell Feigenbaum, from Chaos: Making New Science)
