“Time was when I loved books on astronomy — and understood them. I can’t understand the new ones — they seem to require a new language. When a scientist like Jeans tells me that a ‘quantum’ of energy can ‘pass from one orbit of the atom to another without crossing the intervening space‘ I metaphorically turn up my toes. Of this be true, the materialists have their last prop knocked from under them. I accept the ‘quantum theory’ becaue Sir James Jeans hands it out to me. But neither he nor anyone else can make me accept the ‘planetesimal hypothesis.’ ”
— L.M. Montgomery
I heard a lecturer say that one reason Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were idols in their day is that their achievements linked science and technology in a way that the public could understand. Relativity and quantum physics were too difficult for all but a few (that Bohr quote comes to mind). Montgomery probably stated here what most people felt.
Quantum physics, at some points, feels like theology or philosophy … very exciting, and … takes some getting used to. After Newtonian physics, especially.