i guess im missing what makes them false in this universe. maybe i dont know the right questions to ask. how would you explain it to a 5th grader?
The reality of the physical universe is not at all what we naively perceive (and what the ancient Greeks thought), but it is something completely different and weird. The naive logic of metaphysics (a.k.a. classical logic) is not at all appropriate to describe and reason about the physical universe.
The Mr. Tompkins books (see
here) were very good at illustrating what would happen if the weirdness of the physical universe were of such a scale to be perceptible to our human senses directly.
The double slit experiment is often used to introduce people to the weirdness of the quantum world:
…Photon Source
---------Slit A-----------Slit B------------
…Detector
Each slit can be opened or closed. If both slits are closed, then nothing shows up at the detector. If just slit A is open, you get a certain amount of photons at the detector. If just slit B is open, you get a certain amount of photons at the detector. According to classical logic, A implies (A or B), and B implies (A or B), so that if both slits are open, you should get
more photons at the detector, or at the very least just as many as went through either slit. After all, how can opening slit B affect the photons that go through slit A?
But when the experiment is performed with both slits open,
no photons show up at the detector. Classical reasoning doesn’t apply at all.