An alternative view of Newtonian mechanics

This is not the right comparison, and I had tried to preempt this objection in my reply to you. If quantum electrodynamics (QED) were a theory that was specifically crafted to match all the experimental results that we already had, then you would be right - it would be no more special than a well-constructed airplane. But QED was proposed way before we had the capability to test it to 12 decimal places. In fact, quantum mechanics started out in the 1920s to describe the results of relatively crude experiments like the Stern-Gerlach experiment. But it turns out that the basic postulates of quantum theory, taken to their logical conclusions, are able to hold strong for almost a century. The fair comparison would be if a Cessna designed to fly 15,000 feet above the ground turned out to be able to take us beyond the Solar System. (In fact, I don’t think airplanes have any functionality with the precision of 12 decimal points.) To me, that would point to the fact that there’s something fundamentally special about that Cessna - more than just a human construction for a limited purpose.

But Einstein didn’t completely overthrow Newton’s laws. He still had to respect its basic principles applied in the right circumstances. And indeed, special relativity reduces perfectly to Newtonian mechanics in the right limits. Many theories throughout the history of physics followed this beautiful correspondence principle. This seems to point to a unifying set of principles underlying all of the laws which our theories are gradually approximating better and better.

I don’t quite understand how this has to do with opposing falsificationism. Whether theories merely make good predictions or actually reflect an aspect of nature-as-it-really-is is separate from the issue of how we are supposed to separate good from bad theories, which is what falsificationism is all about. (In fact, traditional Popperian falsificationism would say that we cannot verify that theories are true, only that they are false.) Anyway, I think we’ve digressed from the original topic.

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