The Role of Problem Representation in Physics

Inasmuch as people are good at predicting the outcome of physical interactions in the world around them, why are they so bad at physics, even the branch of physics (mechanics) that deals with the interaction of everyday objects? I argue here that the process of mentally simulating events so as to predict their outcome, a facility possessed by most people for common contexts, is extended and refined in a skilled scientist to become a sharp and crucial intuition that can be used in solving difficult, complex or extraordinary problems. Novices, lacking this ex­ tended intuition, find such problems difficult.