I was talking to someone the other day who explained to me that the laws of physics as we understand them are not necessarily ‘rules’ that things on a really tiny scale obey, and the calculations we use to talk about physics on a scale that’s relevant to humans are more like estimations of what will *most probably* happen as a result. This also means there’s no such thing as a perfect circle or a perfect sphere I think? Could someone ELI5?
In: Physics
It’s about probabilities at different scales.
If you throw a dice 6 times, it’s likely you won’t get each number once
You may get {6,1,3,3,2,4}.
I’ve got twice as many 3s as 1s here for example.
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However if I throw a dice 6000 times, the chances are that I’ll get each number a roughly even number of times (in terms of percentage differences).
The chances of getting twice as many 3s as 1s would be incredibly small.
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In both these examples, the physics of the dice doesn’t change – it’s just that at larger scales, the laws of probabilities are more apparent.
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This is why individual particles at the quantum scale can be hard to predict but large groups of atoms (such as a bouncing ball) are much easier to predict
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