| > The models used in undergraduate physics classes, or even to high school physics are not statistical. You are correct insofar as they are not presented as being statistical. But in reality, they are. Ohm's law is a good example. Resistors in reality do not have the exact resistance specified on the package, but rather are constructed within a certain tolerance, so that the final behavior of the circuit will be, again, a distribution. This would be an example of measurement error. The quantum effects also exist, as Intel will affirm as they are trying to build very small transistors, and the behavior of such transistors is probabilistic. > Maybe the public, but not the actual scientists... Ehh, I'm an "actual scientist". I work in bioinformatics & medical research. I don't care about what the public thinks for the purposes of this conversation. Even actual scientists will sometimes use this shorthand if the error is small enough, which is fine by me. > At a certain point we stop worrying...but there is no practical purpose. You're right. When we talk about the error rate in predicting planetary orbits, there is no practical purpose. My only point in my original reply was that the "exact" is a special case and a simplification of the statistical model, which is ubiquitous. If we are wanting to be technically correct, however, I stand by my assertion that all physical laws are inherently statistical. I think we don't really disagree. This all started because you asserted there are phenomena which are "not statistical in nature", which I disagree with at a pedantic level. |
I think we'll agree there. Because while you are technically correct you aren't practically.
Like how the Newtonian equations taught to undergrads literally don't have statistics. It isn't that it isn't presented to them that way, it is that they are using a different model. Going through physics (because this is the experience I have) you just keep learning better and better models.
As for Intel, you're confusing micro and macro scales. With the ohm's law you just measure the resistor before applying. This would be common procedure, depending on application. But this conversation is really arguing extremely fine points.