All findings of science are provisional until we have better findings which is pretty common these days.
The degree to which clocks are affected by speed is precisely explained by the math of Special Relativity, which is why among other things, GPS works.
If you want to understand this better without learning a bunch of math, PBS has run a few shows lately about Einstein that can help. I understand that they have a web site where you can still view them.
I might add that both documentaries about Einstein mentioned a few significant relevant facts that I had no idea about and I'm not talking about his randy nature! ;-)
For example, my hero Newton apparently did not know how to properly calculate kinetic energy, and this error persisted for like a century or more. That misapprehension was corrected by another randy scientist around the time of the French Revolution, but you'll have to do your own studying to catch up on that!
There were apparently a few corrections to his theories before Einstein! However, he's still my hero for inventing that bane of undergraduate students - Calculus.
GPS requires both general and special relativity!
Although not much of newtonian notation remains! I can only thing of working with angular velocity, but sure there are plenty more.
Jay perhaps you don't understand that it isn't that clock mechanisms are affected...it is time itself that is affected. The clocks are correctly reporting the relativistic dilation of time.
It is an unfortunate fact that the detailed workings of the universe are exceedingly counter intuitive. Which is precisely what makes it so difficult to understand and yet so fascinating.
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What interests me most about quantum entanglement is the possibility that it might be a real world embodiment of a worm-hole (a worm hole connecting the two particles together so that there is no distance between them hence no spooky action at a distance, or perhaps the particles are a representation of the ends of a worm-hole) and hence provides a glimpse of how general relatively and quantum mechanics may be reconciled.
So what, the applications are tangible and intuitive, from the transistor to the GPS.
Yeah like last night I slathered a slice of bread with Epoisse and smelled the bread.
Similarly, you may be surprised to hear that both of the recent PBS documentaries actually mentioned this.
Entanglement doesn't actually allow the transport of information faster than light so I don't think this is an area where QM and relativity conflict.
I also don't see how entanglement has something to do with general relativity.
So no masking there. Guess: advanced Maillard reaction products are close enough to what triggers our internal smoke alarm to be perceived in very low concentrations, even above the special perfume of this slithery cheese.
The point is I don't think Newtonian mechanics, QM, QE are intuitive. Neither is relativistic time dilation. If they were, they would have been discovered centuries ago and we would not have needed the very smart people to come along and explained these phenomena.
I think Feynman would agree with me on this one.
The applications are intuitive - but that's a different matter. Kind of like the effects of gravity.
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Speak of the devil. I just finished mine this week (on my home baked 'calorie bomb' bread) to the delight of my wife who has been complaining bitterly every lunchtime I pulled it out of the refrigerator.
Well I remember the GPS constellation going up. Intuitive was not something I would have said about it. The fact that it worked at all was pretty mind boggling. The fact that chipsets for it are a few $ now even more so.
In my experience the smell of s**t usually wins. A miracle of modern technology a totally running away Epoisse that couldn't even hold its own against a simple bread yeast, as far as I'm concerned the end times are very near.
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Folk knowledge has it that lighting a match drives away the fall-out of even the foulest dump. Are they still legal (matches, that is)?
This is why people burn those little perfume candles in the toilets when they have dinner parties. It is supposed hides the smell of any guests 'dump'. or gas emissions However, the real reason I suspect is to offer some respite for those guests that just need to get away from the smell of the Epoisse for a few minutes.
So what? I don't see any reasons why these should be intuitively accessible to the next Joe Sixpack. Those who ought to understand them, are smart enough to do it without using intuition as a research method (if that still works today, long after Newton and the apple). They have the mindset and skills to accept the fundamental principles and build up from there. It is the results that verify and validate a theory, intuition is not an acceptance criteria.
I was always surprised why people are never concerned about the lack of intuition in advanced math (speaking about QM, try to describe in common language a Hilbert space) but are so concerned about QM not being intuitive.
BTW, I find Newtonian/classical mechanics fully intuitive, starting with the principles and ending with the Emmy Noether conservation theorem (to me, as a simple amateur, the most fascinating result in Physics) and the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms.
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