By now it is probably apparent that not all aspects of physics are intuitive. In fact, some of the most exciting things about physics involve cases where our intuition positively fails us. Sometimes our intuition tells us that a situation cannot possibly be true, and yet it is. Let us start our exploration of counter-intuitive physics by going back to the subject of buoyancy.
Buoyancy Revisited
Many people think that modern physics is unintuitive, and there is certainly some truth to that sentiment. Viewed from outside, the field is getting stranger and stranger. Nevertheless, unintuitive physics is by no means a contemporary phenomenon; it began much, much earlier. Buoyancy, to take one example, has been known for more than 2,000 years, and even after all that time the subject remains largely unintuitive. For how can a very heavy ship be held up simply by the buoyant force of water? Of course, we saw in the last chapter that this concept can be made intuitive if one thinks about it correctly. We might call that a matter of correcting our intuition to make the unintuitive part of physics feel more intuitive. Yet it still seems very strange, especially when contemplating supertankers nearly a half-kilometer long that can carry cargo weighing more than a half-million metric tons!
