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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’d argue it doesn’t really. It’s the same on all scales.

It’s just at larger scales we can make simpler approximations and still get accurate results. So why go through all the work?

It’s like how one person clapping creates a rythmic periodic sound. But as you add more and more it turns into a steady roar. At some point you can just treat it as one single sound rather than a combination of lots of smaller ones.

The actual mechanics of the origin of the sound are the same. But you don’t have to be that detailed in modeling the sound anymore. You can say it’s a single source with a specific intensity and disperses by the inverse square law.

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