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	<title>Comments on: [Quote] When all the models are wrong</title>
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		<title>By: TomLoredo</title>
		<link>http://groundtruth.info/AstroStat/slog/2008/quote-when-all-the-models-are-wrong/comment-page-1/#comment-165</link>
		<dc:creator>TomLoredo</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:25:04 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description>&quot;Newtonian physics and general relativity are both wrong.&quot;

While I agree in large part with Larry&#039;s sentiments, I think he chose a bad example here.  GR is probably the only physical theory that is &quot;not wrong,&quot; in the sense that there isn&#039;t a shred of observable evidence that contradicts it (as far as I know), despite lots of looking.  The challenge is that it&#039;s a theory for the weakest force we know of, so it&#039;s hard to really probe its limits in laboratory (or even astrophysical) settings.  I think nearly all physicists think it (and all theories) must be &quot;wrong&quot; in some regime, but it&#039;s beginning to get embarassing (from a philosophical perspective) that we can&#039;t &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; it.  Put another way, we believe GR is wrong, but don&#039;t yet know it&#039;s wrong.

&quot;Electromagnetism and QED are both wrong&quot; might have been a better example, in the sense that we know of regimes where both theories fail to describe nature accurately.

Harold Jeffreys made a related observation in his book, &lt;em&gt;Probability Theory&lt;/em&gt;, many years ago, pointing out that there was probably seldom (if ever) a time in history when a Newtonian model of planetary motion would be found to be acceptable by a significance test (either due to classical model limitations such as assuming sphericity or neglecting many-body effects, or more recently, due to GR corrections).  But at no time were scientists prepared to abandon Newtonian theory (there being nothing to replace it until GR).</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;Newtonian physics and general relativity are both wrong.&#8221;</p>
<p>While I agree in large part with Larry&#8217;s sentiments, I think he chose a bad example here.  GR is probably the only physical theory that is &#8220;not wrong,&#8221; in the sense that there isn&#8217;t a shred of observable evidence that contradicts it (as far as I know), despite lots of looking.  The challenge is that it&#8217;s a theory for the weakest force we know of, so it&#8217;s hard to really probe its limits in laboratory (or even astrophysical) settings.  I think nearly all physicists think it (and all theories) must be &#8220;wrong&#8221; in some regime, but it&#8217;s beginning to get embarassing (from a philosophical perspective) that we can&#8217;t <em>show</em> it.  Put another way, we believe GR is wrong, but don&#8217;t yet know it&#8217;s wrong.</p>
<p>&#8220;Electromagnetism and QED are both wrong&#8221; might have been a better example, in the sense that we know of regimes where both theories fail to describe nature accurately.</p>
<p>Harold Jeffreys made a related observation in his book, <em>Probability Theory</em>, many years ago, pointing out that there was probably seldom (if ever) a time in history when a Newtonian model of planetary motion would be found to be acceptable by a significance test (either due to classical model limitations such as assuming sphericity or neglecting many-body effects, or more recently, due to GR corrections).  But at no time were scientists prepared to abandon Newtonian theory (there being nothing to replace it until GR).</p>
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