Comment Re:Good quote (Score 3, Insightful) 301
"Just because you can write an equation that describes something ... doesn't mean that such an equation describes the real physics that are going on."
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
Well quite. A lot of people seem to forget (or were never taught most likely) that physics is just a model of the real world. Maths is an entirely man-made construction which is why we can achieve lofty things like proofs in maths and maths derived subjects (computing etc). Physics and physical sciences just use maths to model the real world. Models tend to go wrong in certain corner cases. Newtonian physics was the "correct" model until Einstein's General Relativity. That doesn't marry on the small scale with quantum physics so that's not "correct" in all cases either...
It's madness to think that because we define a model in a man-made formulism that the real world must obey that model. The real world has other ideas.
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
Well quite. A lot of people seem to forget (or were never taught most likely) that physics is just a model of the real world. Maths is an entirely man-made construction which is why we can achieve lofty things like proofs in maths and maths derived subjects (computing etc). Physics and physical sciences just use maths to model the real world. Models tend to go wrong in certain corner cases. Newtonian physics was the "correct" model until Einstein's General Relativity. That doesn't marry on the small scale with quantum physics so that's not "correct" in all cases either...
It's madness to think that because we define a model in a man-made formulism that the real world must obey that model. The real world has other ideas.
