[gjm11]

> Take for example electronics. [...]

No one thinks or says that finding an error in physics would make devices fail. What people say is (1) that in some cases if X were wrong then all these things would never have worked in the first place and (2) that in some cases if you try to design things using wrong science then the things you design won't work well.

[nighthawk648]

Well while I agree and describe to some effect, more derived though, my physics professor said a couple of times of physics was wrong devices would fail. It is implying it wouldn’t have worked to begin with, I was taking the step forward that maybe it would until a fault tolerance level was reached.

Fault tolerance level is reached all the time. Devices and network solutions fail pretty regularly, all sorts of crazy bugs, both programmatic and hardware based. Not saying the underlying physics IS wrong, but I am sure there is a degree of accuracy which diverges and causes the edge cases. For example my network coverage goes out for no reason. The way the radio waves propagate to the cell tower is inefficient, maybe there’s some hidden science that can do it better. BELIEVE ME I would say impossibility level is like %99.999999 but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

[gjm11]

So you're just saying: if the laws are just slightly wrong then devices built according to the wrong laws may fail but only very rarely and it may take us a while to notice? And therefore we can't say "these physical theories must be right because otherwise we'd see things failing" because the failures might be very rare?

Sure, that's correct, but no one[1] actually claims that present-day physics is known to be exactly right. For the excellent reason that present-day physics is known not to be exactly right. (Because our best theory of large-scale phenomena is general relativity, and our best theory of small-scale phenomena is quantum field theory, and if there's a way to combine those into a single theory that doesn't contradict itself then no one's found it yet.)

[1] Obviously any time you say "no one says X" you're likely to be wrong, because for any crazy thing there will be some people who say it. But no one who actually knows much about science is going to claim that present-day physics is exactly right, unless they're deliberately oversimplifying.

[nighthawk648]

Exactly... nothing further for me to contribute! Thank you for listening!