> Giving accurate results is missing the point. No, that's the central point of modern (starting with Newton) physical science. In fact, I'd argue that's the m

> Giving accurate results is missing the point. No, that's the central point of modern (starting with Newton) physical science. In fact, I'd argue that's the main reason for the astonishing advances of the physics in mere 300 years: people stopped bothering too much about philosophical underpinning of reality and started to fucking measure the reality instead, as precisely and accurately as they could and then some. Fresnel's optics won over Newton's not because of its superior philosophical merits (it needs luminiferous aether to be a perfectly rigid incompressible solid, after all), but simply because it very accurately described light's interference, diffraction, all kinds of refraction and the accompanying polarization, and also dispersion, all in one nice, self-contained package. That's what mattered, not the ridiculousness or reasonableness of proposition that light corpuscles have poles and can experience fits of easy transmission/reflection. > Hint: The point is understanding how nature's does it. By being itself, how else? /s