At 08:25 PM Saturday 11/29/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote:
>(Although to be fair, classical mechanics does sum up pretty well what
>we see on our scale. It's just right for the wrong reasons, is all. :)
Why is it "for the wrong reasons"? Some would say that if it leads
to predictions which match the observations closely enough to be
useful, it's good enough, at least in the limited range of
observations of interest where it is applicable ("our scale"), and
matching or not matching observations of reality is all that makes a
model "right" or "wrong." No one except a theoretical physicist is
going to devote such huge amounts of computation time to a real world
problem where classical mechanics gives a good enough answer to
predict frex whether a building will stand or fall or whether a space
probe will successfully land on Mars or crash or miss the planet
entirely . . .
. . . ronn! :)
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