I’ve been intimidated by the words for such a long time that I feel surprised when the concepts are sort of straightforward.
First of all, what even is “quantum physics”? It turns out that a “quantum” is the tiniest possible thing. Planck and Einstein at the turn of the 20th century published about energy having a fundamental unit that is discrete, like, it can’t be broken down any further. There can be one of it. There can’t be fractions of it. One energy.
So, then science essentially has to be “quantized.” We’re used to bulk phenomena. Everything we can see and touch and taste is made out of building blocks, so we have rules that govern bulk. Rules that govern quantized things have to switch from the kind of math that has decimal points to the kind of math that works with finite conditions. Probabilities turn out to be the answer. And then waves and wave functions become a whole thing.
It seems to me that what makes Quantum Physics the kind of concept that gets illustrated by a huge blackboard covered in math is the need by physicists for quantum phenomena to translate into bulk phenomena (classical phenomena). The reason all of this is mathematical is because it always had been predictable mathematically. Sir Isaac Newton et al. provided us with a bunch of laws that were working. We could measure and predict.
So, how is it that things at our everyday “cars-on-a-hill” life is governed by this particular math while the individual units cars and hills are made of have different laws? What about gigantic phenomena like stars and galaxies and black holes? Which set of the laws works? Both? None? All of them in some way? What are the limits? Can anything travel faster than the speed of light? What about information? Does it have mass?