Counterintuitive means contrary to what seems intuitively right or correct. A counterintuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be
true when assessed using
intuition or gut feelings.
Scientifically discovered,
objective truths are often called
counterintuitive when intuition,
emotions, and other
cognitive processes outside of deductive
rationality interpret them to be wrong. However, the subjective nature of intuition limits the objectivity of what to call
counterintuitive because what is counter-intuitive for one may be intuitive for another. This might occur in instances where intuition changes with knowledge. For instance, many aspects of quantum mechanics may sound counterintuitive to a layman, while they may be intuitive to a particle physicist.
Flawed understanding of a problem may lead to counter-productive behavior with
undesirable outcomes. In some such cases, counterintuitive policies may then produce a more desirable outcome.
Many scientific ideas that are generally accepted by people today were formerly considered to be contrary to intuition and common sense.
For example, most everyday experience suggests that the
Earth is flat; actually, this view turns out to be a remarkably good approximation to the true state of affairs, which is that the Earth is a
very big (relative to the day to day scale familiar to humans)
oblate spheroid. Furthermore, prior to the
Copernican revolution,
heliocentrism, the belief that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than
vice versa, was considered to be contrary to common sense.
Another counterintuitive scientific idea concerns
space travel: it was initially believed that highly streamlined shapes would be best for re-entering the earth's atmosphere. In fact, experiments proved that
blunt-shaped re-entry bodies make the most efficient heat shields when returning to earth from space. Blunt-shaped re-entry vehicles have been used for all manned-spaceflights, including the
Mercury,
Gemini,
Apollo and
Space Shuttle missions.
The
Michelson-Morley experiment sought to measure the velocity of the Earth through the
aether as it revolved around the Sun. The result was that it has no aether velocity at all.
Relativity theory later explained the results, replacing the conventional notions of aether and separate space, time, mass, and energy with a counterintuitive four-dimensional
non-Euclidean universe.
