Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
It reminds me of the time I was learning calculus and encountered the idea that a point on a curve has a slope associated with it. Obviously, a point has no slope, but the entire edifice of calculus hinged on this idea, so I had to try to grasp it, but could not.
I thought intensively about it for two weeks and then gave up, and instead just learned the formulas. After a while, it stopped bothering me and I proceeded on to much more math.

I was just reading Ammianus Marcellinus' account of Jovian's campaigns in Persia, and marveled at the way that the question of whether or not to fight a battle seemed not to be based on strategy, but rather on personal initiative moderated by divination. "The foraging guys just killed a lion. That means a king will fall", etc.

It is no easy task to build a consensual reality which is both useful and understandable to most people.
I had a similar problem to this with chemistry, at up to mid school level, I tried to understand how what they were telling me made sense, but I could not. I was falling behind in lessons until I realised that the answer was not to think, but to accept. As the chemistry became more complicated, I started to get better at it.

Anyway it made me wonder if the guys at the large hadron collider had the same problem, data that doesn't work, no way to understand it or use it.