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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that's what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it's wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn't mean it is right.
Agreed, but it leads to people who are less knowledgeable to draw the wrong conclusions.
Basically for just about anything you want to do on Earth Newton works perfectly fine. You can send people to the moon using nothing but Newton. Two big things you need Einstein for is the orbit of Mercury and GPS satellites. So from a pure science point of view Newton is wrong or maybe incomplete. From a regular Joe point of view Newton is dead on. By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration. So people think vaccines are dangerous, wearing masks is dumb, herbs and spices cure cancer, global warming is fake and homeopathic shit does anything except remove money from their wallets. Because what do scientists know, they've been wrong all the time in the past.
Newton is not wrong, it's just incomplete for some very niche things. And Einstein fixed all of that so we're all good.
In reality it's good to always be looking to disprove something and create new and better knowledge. But only if that's your job and only for very niche things. We've got the basics down for most things on Earth and there is no reason any regular person should doubt that.
Be careful saying homeopathy only removes money from wallets. Yes it does that but it can be worse. Most of the vials are just water but any with a 1x or 1c designation actually do have some of the herbal element remaining and can cause problems.
I've never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever? The fact that science can be updated, changed, revolutionized, is what makes it powerful.
If people need to be 'protected' from that fact, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way science is taught in schools. I can't accept that the average person can't comprehend such a simple idea that would take less than an hour to convincingly communicate.
YES because often times the opposing model is the Bible, which is updated very irregularly and people will form sects over a single differing interpretation of a single passage.
Changing your mind / learning new information can be construed as the super-hated "flip-flop".
Unfortunately, the illogical are immune to logic. No amount of it will be effective.
That's incredibly shocking and concerning.
Yes, the average person is ignorant of stuff that need to be updated once in a while. There is something wrong with the current form of education. And you need to accept that understanding doesn't come easy.
If you can't do that last part, well, there you go. Same thing for the average person.
It's less that Newton is wrong and more like it's an approximation. Things always get more complicated because we are learning more about everything all the time, but for simple day to day things Newton is fine to be used and even taught.
You could also say it's important from a historical perspective, learning how we got from Newton to bigger and better things is important too.
I think you communicated it well in two paragraphs.
You see this thinking in science too. Dark matter has always struck me as an awful solution to a model breaking down. It's basically "the numbers don't add up so let's add a fudge factor to make it say what we want". But you're generally considered a kook for questioning it now. People will spout a bunch of big words and hope you shut up if you do.
It's called dark because we can't see it, and matter because it interacts gravitationally. There is nothing wrong with the term and the model of it even if we don't fully understand what the hell exactly it actually is and most importantly why it actually is. It's literally how science works. We don't know what the hell quantum probabilities and all the weird particles and fields mean on a metaphysical level either but QFT is the most tested and predictively powerful theory of science ever made. Is it complete? No, we may even never find the theory of everything. But it doesn't make our discoveries wrong.
Dark matter has been supported by various observations and is the best explanation we have. It's not the most widely accepted model just by pure faith, you know.
I have to admit I never liked it too much myself, but what do I know? There is an alternative theory, but it has its own problems.
I think it's more a matter of, "We know there's something that's causing an effect, but we can't see it or fully explain it... yet." There's something in the science and observations that's just not lining up the way it should. There are some ideas that have floated around that say that dark matter isn't necessary, it's just a misunderstanding of one factor or another, but nobody has really been able to nail the question yet, so it persists.
It’s more than that. There’s something that doesn’t add up, but if we assume the answer is “dark matter”, we can make predictions about it, that can guide us toward proving or disproving. Similarly, if we assume it’s one of the other theories, we can make predictions on what it must be like.
Dark matter is most straightforward because we understand best how matter acts. How much more matter do we need for the observations to make sense, based on current understanding? Ok, what could that matter be that acts gravitationally but we can’t see? How can we detect that?
Mmmm, Earth Newton...
I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.
I prefer mine:
Why use many words when few will do?
I personally think that “all models are wrong” does nothing to stop people from simply thinking in terms of practical inevitabilities, when it’s actually extremely important to understand that figuring out what’s “actually going on” was never even the concern of science in the first place.
It's not so much that it reduces to Newtonian predictions but that at human scale and energy levels the difference between Newtonian and general relatively is so small it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
What you’re describing is literally what it means for general relativity to reduce to Newtonian mechanics. You can literally derive Newton’s equations by applying calculus to general relativity. In fact, if you ever get a physics degree, you’ll have to learn how to do it.
It's inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.
In fact, Lord Rutherford said that "ALL models are wrong, but some are useful" 🙂
While we're talking about scientific nobility...
"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."
-- Lord Kelvin
Conversely, just because a model is wrong doesn't mean it's not useful.
Some relevant reading: The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.
I think OP knew that. He was just repeating what he read in a meme.
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don't need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there's depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury's weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein's relativity and it's still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can't say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that's just science.
I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?
We noticy it's effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It's a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can't catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.
Now that there is an understandable analogy.
I think the best way to say it is, relarivity can reduce to Newtonian at small (but not sub atomic) scales, or that Newtonian mechanics are incomplete
I think it's better to say that Newtonian physics is incomplete rather than wrong.
Bingo. All models are "wrong", good models are useful despite being "wrong". Relativity is wrong too since it can't account for anything quantum... Relativity isn't better, it's just more accurate under certain conditions - but outside of those conditions it's more complex than it needs to be, and Newton's models are good enough.
Ah. So it’s relative.
Ultimately, all science and all knowledge about the universe around us is always going to be relative and incomplete. They are all just models. The only model that's complete is the universe itself, and we can't cram that into our tiny brains.
Correction. We can't cram that into our tiny brains and still be "human". We would likely be something on a closer level of, say, the "Q" from Star Trek. Or possibly Urza from Magic the Gathering. Which, based on my understanding of the lore of both IPs, I would rather be Q than be Urza.
I think that's the point they were making.