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Re:So You Want to Learn Physics by noobermin on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:32PM (#12696217)
It depends on which subset of physics you restrict to. Often times. Math is often "bent" to match physical intuition and people drop some mathematical models over others because they match intuition and experiment better. As a result, there is no consistent narrative across the whole field and even across subfields in some cases.

Often times, there are no "failed theoretical frameworks", it's not like special relativity is "right" and newtonian mechanics is "wrong", they are right in different physical regimes. If they are down right wrong, then they wouldn't be known to us anyway.

If you stick to parts where theoretical physicists live, it's easier to find mathematical consistency and coherence, like QFT. Outside of that region, what things are and what approximations you use really come down to "what matches experiment best" at best and "what people will allow me to publish with" at worst.

Re:So You Want to Learn Physics by j2kun on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:23PM (#12697176)
> it's not like special relativity is "right" and newtonian mechanics is "wrong", they are right in different physical regimes

Hence I said, "where they fail" not "whether they fail." Is there even a single mathematical model of the physical world that does not fail in some way?

Re:So You Want to Learn Physics by noobermin on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:51PM (#12697325)
I was specifically referring to the part of that sentence regarding "centuries of failed experiments and feuds." Yes, you don't need to go through all the models, but many of what people with a lay knowledge of physics call failed models aren't really failed, they just apply in regimes that they could probe at the time in terms of theory and experiment. You might not have been referring to that.

And yes, there is no single mathematical model of the physical world that I am aware of. None.

One last thing that I should say that I probably didn't say clearly enough: from physics comes the mathematical models, not the other way around. Relativity didn't come out of newtonian mechanics, it came out of a change of the underlying physical model which then yield relativistic models that reduce to newtonian mechanics.