4 ms·
The fact that they are mutually incompatible does not mean they are "pretty clearly flawed". In their particular domain they work splendidly well, just as Newto
by littletimmy 11y ago
The fact that they are mutually incompatible does not mean they are "pretty clearly flawed". In their particular domain they work splendidly well, just as Newton's laws work splendidly well when talking about the movement of objects at human scale.
All we can say is that they are incompatible at some extreme.
- nilkn 11y agoThe Standard Model is flawed just on its own as well. For instance, while it accurately predicts the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron, it does not do so for the muon. It's also spectacularly wrong about the vacuum energy (over 100 orders of magnitude wrong).
- darkmighty 11y agoWoah, I had the idea that quantum theory had the "small stuff" all going well according to predictions. Is the phenomenon you describe with the muon incompatible with the quantum field theories?
- nine_k 11y agoThey are clearly flawed, but these flaws do not prevent their extremely successful practical applications. The same is the case with Newtonian mechanics: it's quite good when you need to construct a lever, a house, an automobile, or an airplane. They start to slightly squeak when you need to build a rocket or predict an orbit of a planet close to a star. This is where you detect the flaws, find a better approximation (SR/GR and QM), and it allows for vastly more interesting practical applications, from atomic bombs to GPS devices, and also turns your idea of cosmos upside down. So when a refinement on GR and/or QM is found, we should expect some quite interesting practical applications, along with another upheaval of the idea of cosmos. This makes studying the incompatibility "in some extreme" a very practical thing.