Will we ever get a genuinely intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, or is shut up and calculate the permanent answer

[EntangledOne29]

Quantum mechanics has been an extraordinarily successful theory for roughly a century now, correctly predicting experimental results to an almost absurd degree of precision, and yet physicists still genuinely disagree about what the theory actually means at a fundamental level, whether particles have definite properties before measurement, whether the universe is fundamentally probabilistic, or whether there are hidden variables we simply have not discovered yet. The famous shut up and calculate attitude essentially argues that the mathematics works perfectly well and worrying about a deeper intuitive meaning is a distraction from actually doing useful physics.

Others argue that a theory this successful deserves a genuine philosophical resolution eventually, and that treating the interpretive questions as permanently unanswerable gives up too easily on a problem that simply has not been cracked yet rather than one that is fundamentally uncrackable. Do you think humanity will ever actually reach a genuinely intuitive understanding of what is happening at the quantum level, or is the mathematics destined to remain our only real access point forever?

[Outlaw]

I honestly think our brains evolved to understand a macroscopic, classical world and there might be a hard biological limit to ever intuitively grasping something this far removed from everyday experience.

[Ben]

Shut up and calculate always struck me as intellectually a bit lazy, even if it is pragmatically effective for actually getting physics done day to day.

[Rabbit11]

New generations of physicists keep finding fresh ways to think about these interpretive questions, so I would not bet against real conceptual progress eventually happening, even if it takes another century.

[CantComplain12]

Whatever the eventual answer turns out to be, I find it oddly comforting that a theory this precisely accurate can still leave room for this much genuine philosophical disagreement among actual experts.

[DistantSequence]

Feels a bit like asking whether we will ever intuitively understand a four dimensional shape. Maybe the honest answer is that some things can be correctly described mathematically without ever becoming truly intuitive.

[Henry78]

I think the honest answer is that intuition itself might just be the wrong tool for this specific job, the same way our intuition fails badly with relativity at very high speeds