Q&A: Approximately Right?
Approximately Right?
Question
With God's help
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask a question that is a bit hard for me to formulate, but I hope you'll understand.
It is: what is the relationship between understanding or knowledge and precision and correctness?
Because seemingly there is something very strange about the fact that people actually manage to conduct themselves and be right in everyday life even though they are not really working from correct or precise basic assumptions, if any at all.
Or often they do not even have any definition or conscious assumption at all, and still they manage to act properly.
A somewhat different example of this can be found, for instance, on the scientific plane, where one can use Newton's laws even though they are not "true."
And so the people before Newton still managed to function in many areas of everyday life, even though the definition some of them had for understanding the world was built on a mistake. For example, that a heavier mass also falls faster, and still things worked for them properly for thousands of years.
If so, how does this wonder happen, that a person manages to act with an imprecise definition at best and with no definition at all at worst (or vice versa), and still succeeds in hitting the mark?
Also, I wanted to ask another question: what exactly is a scientific law? Is it our formulation of reality in the world, and if so is it enough for us to formulate a law that satisfies us at the level of precision that can be tested? Or is a scientific law "more than that"—for example, that it tries to hit upon something "real," some kind of identity between it and the world? And if so, how does that process of getting it right occur?
Answer
When one relies on laws that are approximately correct, one succeeds in many cases. There is nothing wondrous about that. Most of our everyday functioning does not depend on precise knowledge. Even the Aristotelian assumption that the speed of falling is proportional to mass—which is not even approximately correct—does not really come into play in everyday life. You would not build a particle accelerator or a spacecraft to the moon that way.
Thank you very much. By the way, if so Aristotle was actually right only regarding momentum, wasn't he? Maybe that would explain the Greek war machine.
As for the second part, I'll ask it as a new question. These are just topics that are a bit hard for me to formulate, and they split in many directions where it's not clear to me what the right way is to approach them.