why does physics work differently depending on scale?

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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

13 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you shoot a fly at a truck. The we can ignore the fly in the calculation of the truck velocity.

If you shoot a fly at another fly. You need to know the size and weight, and perhaps air pressure and humidity data, friction, compression of the body data, to properly calculate where the fly will end up after a collision.

If the fly is blasting through an electron cloud … does it even interact with the fly?

At each level. More detail is required. So our full understanding of everything isn’t clear enough for us to have 1 calculation for everything

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