Penrose (2004: 527):
The non-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics — or, rather, of Nature herself at the level of quantum-mechanical activity — leads many people to despair of finding any kind of trustworthy picture of quantum-level phenomena. Yet, there is much beautiful geometry associated with quantum mechanics in addition to its elegant algebraic structure, and it would be a pity to feel that one must necessarily rely merely upon a pictureless, unvisualisable formalism in order to make headway with the description of quantum actions. Although we have seen that even a single featureless ‘point particle’ appears to be a mysterious spread-out wavy thing in the quantum formalism, it is a ‘thing’ that can be pictured, having a fascinating mathematical structure in which many of the aspects of complex number magic start to show themselves.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, 'Nature' is first-order meaning construed of experience, whereas quantum mechanics is a reconstrual of first-order meaning as the second-order meaning of a scientific theory. If anything, it is second-order meaning of the theory that is 'non-intuitive', not the first-order meaning of Nature.
But the theory ceases to be non-intuitive if wave/particle complementarity is understood as potential/instance complementarity, and if meaning is understood as immanent within semiotic systems, rather than something transcendent and independent of them.
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