Comment Re:Explanation Impossible (Score 1) 234
This is what computers were designed to do, but instead of just doing a numerical simulation, physicists insist on waving their hand and dismissing the error term like it's not even there, so they can keep using nice pretty exact solutions that... don't agree with reality.
I think these people may disagree with you.........
Except that I found this general tendency to dismiss higher order error terms to persist through every year I studied physics at University. I didn't drop out in first year, just so you know.
Simplifying equations is not straight forward, you have to be able to show mathematically that the error term is truly insignificant, but this part seems to be glossed over. Students learn a huge array of simplified equations, and are never really exposed to the original thinking and justification behind them, and often don't even realize they're working with techniques that may not work in corner cases. These same students become researchers and write papers about dark matter.
I think you might be missing the difference between physics taught at an undergraduate level, where the emphasis is on understanding the underlying principles of physics which can be taught with simplified equations and what working physicists actually use (which often rely on solving equations numerically).
