Re:Electromagnetism is a property of spacetime itself, study...
by coldtea on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:44PM
(#27946250)
>To a layperson this sounds like a hack. "Things get screwy when you screw with them, UNLESSSSS we add a magic thing that undoes our work". Well yeah.
What you describe as a "hack" is actually the empirical (look/probe and see what happens) nature of physics as a science.
It seems like a hack because there's no a priori theoritical reason to do it. But physics is not based on verifying empirically a set of a priori rules (who would give them?), but by building theories and rules by empirically looking at things at seeing what model fits, and if a changed model fits better - we then verify those empirically with more experiments.
And this is not "Things get screwy when you screw with them, UNLESSSSS we add a magic thing that undoes our work", but more like a reverse engineering session:
"Behavior X appears to be described by this formula with parameter p. What if we changed the parameter to -p? Hmm, the results would still be consistent with X, if only there was an additional factor v in the formula.
Would this (-p,v) combo buy us anything over our previous (p)?
Wow, yeah, v would then perfectly match the behavior we see for this other thing Y too. So (-p, v) seems to describe both X and Y, whereas before with p we could only describe X.
What you describe as a "hack" is actually the empirical (look/probe and see what happens) nature of physics as a science.
It seems like a hack because there's no a priori theoritical reason to do it. But physics is not based on verifying empirically a set of a priori rules (who would give them?), but by building theories and rules by empirically looking at things at seeing what model fits, and if a changed model fits better - we then verify those empirically with more experiments.
And this is not "Things get screwy when you screw with them, UNLESSSSS we add a magic thing that undoes our work", but more like a reverse engineering session:
"Behavior X appears to be described by this formula with parameter p. What if we changed the parameter to -p? Hmm, the results would still be consistent with X, if only there was an additional factor v in the formula.
Would this (-p,v) combo buy us anything over our previous (p)?
Wow, yeah, v would then perfectly match the behavior we see for this other thing Y too. So (-p, v) seems to describe both X and Y, whereas before with p we could only describe X.