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by magicalist
3398 days ago
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> Physics does have predictive problems when it is applied to weather, climate, etc, because those are complex systems. But that kind of the thing is a minority of the subject matter in physics. There is a far greater number of humans working in applied physics than in characterizing isolated aspects of theoretical systems so I'd question how you judged "minority" there :) Perhaps our disagreement is just in choice of words. The idea that "physics", and all that encompasses, is somehow more predictive than a subset of biology was what triggered my response. If instead you said we have excellent models for simple questions in particle physics, we may have agreed :) As I mentioned on a sibling comment, a simple question like "how an organism will evolve" is of course enormously complex, and if we're going to evaluate the "squishiness" of our answers to it, it's better compared to our ability to predict specific storms a year in advance or how a protoplanetary disk will evolve into a specific configuration of planets. We don't cite those as squishy because we recognize the complexity of the systems involved (and the relative primitiveness of our models). |
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Using any definition for "physics" close to this, while the percentage of biological questions that involve complex systems is close to 100%, it is much lower in physics. The subsets of physics problems that do involve complex systems will suffer the same predictive problems.
In fact, this conversation has got me wondering whether "complex system" really means anything more than "a system whose behavior is hard to predict". I know that complex systems have other common attributes, but really the unpredictability seems to be the defining feature.
This is a long way of saying "I agree that we don't really disagree" :)