re: #40 LudwigVanQuixote

Firt off that was really well written, but paradigm shifts are not always as disruptive as you think. Particularly in physics.

QM did not destroy classical E&M or Newton, it only looked at a different place.

Einstein did not destroy Newton. Einstein’s gravity contains Newtons. Newton was perfectly correct for where he was looking - in the sense that Newton had no reason to think that Gravity could affect space-time - and unless you have a lot of gravity, you can not see the effect.

Once something is a theory, it means that it has made multiple correct predictions that were observed to be so. Any new theory has to explain the same things we already saw happen in the previous theory.

Newton seemed to be correct within the threshhold of what we could measure in that era; but once more accurate measurements could be taken, it turns out Newton’s equations were only a very special case of a more generalized theory; so in that sense he was “wrong”, especially when it came to predicting that exact orbits of the planets. An apple falling off a tree to the ground is only traveling a few miles per hour, and the difference between the Newtonian calculation and the Einsteinian calculation is so miniscule as to be non-measurable. But the path of Mercury (as a famous example) is so influenced by relativistic effects that the Newtonian calculation for its orbit is most definitively “wrong” in the sense that it won’t give the correct answer. Einstein’s calculations would (and did).

What makes revolutions, it seems, are preciser and preciser measurement, which often reveal the flaws in the previous paradigms, which are realized to be approximations or special cases once we see the data at finer resolution.

I didn’t meant on cast aspersions on all scientists — Newton was perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived — only to point out that “wrongness” and “rightness” are highly dependent on who is doing the judging at what point in history. Aristotle for example was much more “right” than any of his contemporaries, but after the intervening 2,500 years we now say that he was “wrong” about everything, strictly speaking.