Your Intuitions Are Built for the Wrong Universe

I don't usually cover physics. My beat is the decidedly human-scale stuff — habits, decisions, how we think, why we get stuck. But occasionally I take a detour into the nature of reality, and I always come back with something useful. Not because physics is a self-help metaphor waiting to be mined, but because the genuine weirdness at the bottom of things has a way of loosening up the assumptions we didn't know we were holding.

So when astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi sat down with Big Think for 69 minutes to walk through the quantum realm, the cosmological realm, and the multiverse, I watched the whole thing. Twice. And the thread I kept pulling on wasn't the physics itself — it was a quieter claim running underneath all of it: your intuitions were never designed for this scale of reality. They were built for the middle. The human-sized world of objects, distances, and time spans we can actually perceive. Everything outside that range — the very small, the very large, the very fast — our cognitive equipment genuinely cannot reach it.

That's not a minor footnote. That's the ballgame.

The atom you learned about is a useful lie

Oluseyi opens by dismantling the solar system model of the atom — the one with electrons orbiting a nucleus like tidy little planets — and he's not gentle about it. "That is not what's happening," he says flatly. Electrons aren't falling around a nucleus the way planets fall around the sun. They're not tiny spheres. They're not really locatable in any classical sense at all.

What they are, according to Oluseyi's preferred framing, is more like musical notes — excitations in underlying quantum fields that permeate all of spacetime. "At the most foundational level, there is this concept of quantum fields," he explains. "And what we call a particle is energy injected into one of those quantum fields." An electron isn't a thing sitting somewhere. It's a disturbance in a field, the way a C note is a disturbance in air. And just as every C is identical regardless of which guitar string produced it, every electron is identical — which is itself a clue, he argues, about their underlying nature.

The quantum fields themselves are even stranger. Unlike electric or gravitational fields, which are generated by something — a charge, a mass — quantum fields have no source. They just exist everywhere, always fluctuating, humming at their lowest possible energy even in what we'd call empty space. For years, Oluseyi says he found this philosophically uncomfortable. "I thought, man, this just can't be real." Then the Higgs field was confirmed experimentally in 2012, a scalar field permeating all of space that gives mass to certain elementary particles (notably not photons, which pass right through it unaffected) — and the discomfort, he suggests, became something closer to awe. The sourceless fields are real. We just have no intuitive framework for them.

The tool works. The explanation is still missing.

Here's where Oluseyi gets genuinely interesting, and where I think he's saying something that matters well beyond physics.

The wave function — quantum mechanics' central mathematical object — describes quantum entities with extraordinary precision. It lives in an abstract mathematical space called a Hilbert space, a vector space with no direct physical counterpart in anything you can see or touch. When you write down a wave function, you get a vector encoding every possible outcome of a measurement, each with an associated probability. Make the measurement, and the system resolves to one of those outcomes. Before the measurement? It's in some combination of all of them.

Crucially, Oluseyi is honest about what this actually tells us: not much, beyond the predictions. "What is it really? We don't know." The wave function is a tool of staggering predictive power — quantum electrodynamics, the theory built on this framework, produces some of the most precise predictions in all of science — but whether it describes something real about the underlying world or just calculates what we'll observe when we look, nobody fully agrees. And the people who say they've resolved that debate, Oluseyi notes with some dryness, have created a paradox in doing so.

He doesn't pretend otherwise, which I find more credible than the confident pop-science version of this story. "I sit in the ignorance," he says. "I sit in the mystery, in the question, and in the curiosity."

I'll be honest: I've seen this framed as a dodge before, the physicist's elegant exit from hard questions. But Oluseyi earns it, because he's done the technical work first. He's not appealing to mystery instead of rigor — he's explaining exactly what we know and how we know it before pointing at the gap. That's a different thing.

Why this matters to people who don't care about physics

The organizing argument Oluseyi builds across both the quantum and cosmological sections is one I keep turning over: the physics that describes reality at scales we can't perceive has been validated with extraordinary precision, but it's also completely indigestible to human intuition. Not because we haven't tried hard enough, but because our intuitions were never meant to operate there. They evolved for a middle range — medium speeds, medium masses, medium distances. That middle range is genuinely well-described by Newtonian mechanics. But Newtonian mechanics is a special case, an approximation, a fiction useful enough to build bridges with but fictional nonetheless.

Oluseyi puts it plainly: "When we hear new information, we try to understand it through analogies or relating it to things that we already know. But there's nothing that we already know that is like the quantum realm. So as your brain tries to make sense of it, it actually confuses you more."

I write about mental models a lot. The productivity and self-help world is littered with mental models — frameworks for thinking better, deciding faster, seeing more clearly. And most of them are genuinely useful at the scale they were designed for. But what Oluseyi is describing is something more unsettling: the possibility that the conceptual tools we reach for most naturally are precisely the ones that mislead us in certain kinds of problems. The more confidently we try to make the unfamiliar fit a familiar frame, the further from accurate we may be getting.

This isn't an argument against using mental models. It's an argument for knowing their jurisdiction.

The entanglement problem, and why "I don't know" is load-bearing

Oluseyi's treatment of quantum entanglement is similarly honest about the edges. Two entangled particles behave as a correlated system — measure one, and you instantly know something about the other, regardless of distance. He acknowledges the physicist's camp that sees nothing mysterious here, just correlation, and the camp that thinks something genuinely weird is happening. He puts himself on the fence, not out of false balance, but because the measurement-across-vast-distances problem hasn't actually been resolved. Simultaneity — what it even means for two events to happen "at the same time" — breaks down across large distances in exactly the way Einstein described. We've measured entanglement between Earth and satellites. We haven't done it at the scales where these paradoxes would actually bite.

So the mystery is preserved, but for a specific technical reason, not because it's prettier that way.

On the question of whether quantum fields exist in spacetime or whether spacetime emerges from quantum fields — the deepest version of the chicken-and-egg problem in physics — Oluseyi argues for mutual fundamentality. Fields require geometry; geometry requires space. Energy requires change; change requires before and after; therefore time. They seem to need each other to exist, and there's no clean way to determine which came first. Like supermassive black holes and the galaxies that surround them: both necessary, both present, and the causal order stubbornly undecidable.

I started watching this video because I was curious. I'm finishing this piece convinced of something more specific: the confidence we bring to most of our thinking — about how things work, about what causes what, about which mental model applies here — is borrowed from a scale of reality that isn't actually fundamental. It's a good approximation for the world we live in, and you'd be foolish to abandon it. But the next time you're certain you understand something because you have a clean analogy for it, worth asking: what scale was this intuition designed for? Is this a domain where the macroscopic approximation holds, or one where you're pointing a instrument at a frequency it wasn't built to read?

That's not a reason to distrust your thinking. It's a reason to stay genuinely curious about where your thinking ends.

Ellis Redmond is Buzzrag's Personal Development & Productivity Correspondent, with occasional detours into the nature of reality. Hakeem Oluseyi's new book, Why Do We Exist?, is out now.