why does physics work differently depending on scale?

746 viewsOtherPhysics

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

Also, physics doesn’t have rules

We observe the universe, find patterns, and then mathematically model those patterns

Stuff like the effects of gravity are super well understood and we can be extremely confident those patterns will continue ro hold true. We can’t be 100% certain, but pretty close

However, any day, we can find exceptions that throw out everything we think we know. As we get better tools and can observe more things, we can see more and more patterns which may go against patterns we were already familiar with

You are viewing 1 out of 13 answers, click here to view all answers.