James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe - eviltoast
  • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    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.

      • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        I prefer mine:

        literally every model is a metaphor and not a true representation of the actual phenomenon it’s modeling.

          • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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            8 months ago

            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.

    • Hugin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        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.