[__MatrixMan__]

I blame Gödel's platonism. He showed us that our theories will always have limits, which is true. But there are two ways to confront this problem:

- Incrementally improve the existing theory, knowing that some of your goals are impossible and hoping that you don't get stuck on one of these.

- Develop as many inconsistent-but-locally-useful theories as possible along a method for selecting the right one in the right situation.

The latter didn't sit right with him or his contemporaries--more for gut-feel reasons than anything practical--so many of us are stuck in this rut where we just compete for opportunities to participate in the former.

[pas]

But .. but ... sure, science as a whole has that particular moby dick, but even when it comes to particle physics there there are many theories (models) side-by-side. Some useful for this, some for that. Grand unified theories (and any theory of everything) will only cover the fundamentals. It's not a coincidence that structural engineers don't have to whip out the Einstein Field Equations when they want to check for resonance, and so on.

And very likely we'll always have competing theories/models at the extremes and they might be inconsistent but they might simply turn out to apply in different regimes, etc.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism (coined by Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow)

[whatshisface]

If there's a method for selecting the right one for the situation, it's all one self-consistent theory

[simonh]

Would you recommend using Newton’s laws to model the behaviour of colliding toy trains at a few feet per second, or Relativity?

[whatshisface]

Newton's laws are a part of relativity, in the way a map of California is a part of a map of the US.

[__MatrixMan__]

I don't see why the two should be connected. Consistency and utility are somewhat orthogonal.

Here's a counterexample:

Einstein chose hyperbolic geometry for arguments about space ships traveling near light speed, but we use spherical geometry for arguments about the shortest path an airplane should take. Those theories disagree about the playfair postulate, so they're inconsistent. Yet we can pretty reliably pick the right one for the job.