[eloff]

I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up the incredible universe that we live in. It seems somehow to get simpler as you go down.

Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.

[staunton]

The first fundamental step in any physics model (or theory) is to separate the easily describable "laws" from the almost impossible to describe "state". The perhaps surprising question is why anything at all can be separated but if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

"Going down" simply means identifying laws that are more universal in that they can underly models of different systems, ideally "any known system". Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. It's similar to how we got used to "masses attract each other" or "things just keep moving in a straight line", which seemed ridiculous to most of Newton's contemporaries.

[tsimionescu]

> Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience.

We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantly harder still than both of them).