The trope that the human brain didn’t evolve to understand advanced physics is often applied in popular science.
After all, early humans’ priorities were constricted to comprehending and contending with predatory threats, learning how to feed themselves and their group, seeking out conditions that were favorable to the functioning of their bodies, and deciding who might make a good candidate to produce offspring with. Wrapping their heads around the intricacies of something like physics would then be an unnecessary, metabolically expensive task with no real benefit to human survival and reproduction, right?
Sure, the laws of classical physics, which relate to Newtonian concepts like velocity and momentum, seem to make sense to us because they describe the behavior of objects in the world as we experience them. When Isaac Newton declared that an object will only change its motion if a force acts upon it, we found this easy to ...
