Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.
Interpretation
Using simple language to describe complex scientific concepts can be difficult and imprecise.
George Johnson uses an analogy to depict the challenge of articulating the complexities of quantum physics through ordinary language. Just like playing a nuanced piece of music with cumbersome equipment hampers performance, translating intricate scientific principles into everyday words and imagery often leads to misunderstandings and oversimplifications.
In practice
In a lecture on quantum mechanics, a professor might use this quote to emphasize the challenges of explaining advanced concepts.
Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium.
This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances.
You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it.
So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.
From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating, the food even not reaching the stomach, determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.
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