Farmer Maggot would probably appreciate those baskets not being full
There are a lot of variations on this.
A few french fries short a happy meal.
Then there are similar lines like telling someone they aren’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer or the brightest crayon in the box
As for the rest, science models the world through abstract mathematics. It provides a skeleton view that relies on data and making predictions. It’s not a complete picture of anything but it is immensely good at explaining efficient and material causes. The device I’m typing this on agrees.
Quantum mechanics explains why gold is gold colored instead of the gray of most metals. It explains the behavior of subatomic particles, radioactivity, etc. Chemistry doesn’t explain those.
Another way of putting the problem is asking how does Occam’s razor apply to science? The reality is that we are trying to minimize multiple things. If I want to know how many oxygens and how many hydrogens will form a water molecule, I can get by on just chemistry. But quantum mechanics gives a more general explanation for more things, not just the chemistry. We want “simple” explanations, but we also want more comprehensive explanations. Trying to maximize more than one thing at a time may not be possible. Unifying all four fundamental forces into a single equation would be simpler in one sense - it’s one equation, not four. But it’s an additional model. Why bother with a unified model in addition to the models for each force?
How about a few turtles short of an actual infinity?
It could also be the nature of Nothing to not, or the way in which the immediate effect of an uncaused cause appears to come from nothing.
Several years ago I had a conversation with a physicist, and the big thing for this person was that quantum phenomena is uncaused, and they thought M-theory would explain it. But they wouldn’t in the least accept if the event is uncaused, then it would be unexplainable.
We’re kinda stuck with needing a notion of causality to work out how things behave to make models.
I have a long considered, impossible to confirm suspicion and wild-assed guess that causality and our intuitive understanding of it breaks down somewhere. Or that the maths can’t demonstrate it (pace Gödel’s incompleteness theorems). Or, that investigations could grind down because we can’t build accelerators large enough to make the observations needed to evaluate models at deeper scales.
If you had a figure skater with arms as long as the radius of Pluto’s orbit, and they tucked in their arms during a spin… That would be one heck of an accelerator.
The notions of causality are pretty basic. Consider how an event may be caused by another event to which the same question applies, or an event could just happen without cause, or then again, an event may be caused by something that doesn’t happen.
I ran this question through an AI tool earlier this year:
Is there a parallel between Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the impossibility of empirically distinguishing between an event that is without cause and an event that is the immediate effect of an uncaused cause?
“There happened to have been one person present in Königsberg who picked up on the anomalous remark of the young logician… he buttonholed Gödel after the discussion ended for the day and… went back to Princeton… to ponder the astounding pronouncement he’d heard.”
Recently it was discovered that photosynthesis is based on the quantum coherence of photons acting in the plant pigment to try out all possible pathways simultaneously before settling on the one with the highest efficiency. So all of life on Earth is based on the strangest phenomenon of physics.
So, it seems we cannot get away from QM to explain a wide range of things in the natural world. If I have time, I would like to attempt to understand this particular explanation.
