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by thrown_22 1317 days ago
A Fourier expansion is a symbolic fitting of data to a curve, yet it provides no information about the systems sampled as shown by the fact that it fits a geocentric model just as well as a heliocentric one.

The idea that an arbitrarily large expression is somehow more understandable than the fourier coefficients of a the first few large terms could only have been done by someone who hasn't looked the the vast array of semi-empirical formulas out there which are as clear as mud.

1 comments

Well, I think the hope is that formulae reveal relationships. Notable applications of SR have mostly been to physics and other science phenomena. So, you do some SR to understand the mathematical form of the relationship, and then carry on by trying to understand it causally.