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
Physics doesn’t work differently at different scales. What does work differently are some of the approximations we make do describe physics. There’s no scientifically accepted formula to describe a macroscopic process that works perfectly in 100% of cases.
You can apply Newton’s law of gravitation to calculate the orbit of a satellite, but the larger the orbiting body is, the less accurate they’ll become. At some point you need to switch to relativistic gravity because by then the Newtonian model is too far off to be useful at all.
It’s all a product of the way we explore the world and conduct science. We started describing the things we could see with our naked eye, and only then moved down smaller and smaller, into the atomic and then quantum scales. That’s not how the universe works, though, everything that happens is a product of quantum processes at the tiniest scale (and who knows, maybe one day we’ll realise it goes even smaller). It’s like looking at a cup of water and trying to come up with math to describe how it responds to outside forces. Yes, you can get pretty close, but you’ll never get a fully accurate model unless you’re going down to the smallest level and simulating everything that each little particle does. It’s those countless interactions that add up to produce the effects we see at our scale.
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