(This is partly a response to the comment above, but I got kind of carried away.)
The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everyday life (except gravity) in ridiculous detail, including all the “natural messiness” you have in mind (except gravity). It consists of some simple and unique (but mathematically tricky) assumptions called “quantum field theory” and “relativity”, plus the following details, which completely specify the theory: * the gauge group is SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) (or “the product of the three simplest things you could write down”) * the matter particles break parity symmetry, using the simplest set of charges that works * there are three copies of each matter particle * there is also a scalar doublet * the 20ish real-valued parameters implied by the above list have values which you can find by doing 20ish experiments.
I dare anybody to give a specification of, say, all of known organic chemistry or geology with a list that short. You don’t need to spell out any mathematical details, so long as a mathematician could plausibly have invented it without being inspired by physical reality (which are the rules I’m playing by in this comment—I think QFT, relativity, and concepts like “gauge group” and “parity symmetry” that I assume knowledge of are all things math could/would have produced eventually).
In some sense I’m handwaving past the hard part, but I think the remarkable thing about physics is that the hard part is entirely math; if you did enough math in a cave without observing anything about the physical world, you would emerge with the kind of perspective from which the known laws of physics (except gravity) seem extremely parsimonious. (Gravity is also parsimonious but sort of stands alone for now.) On the other hand, if you go do a lot of experiments instead, the laws of physics will seem bizarre and complicated. Which I admit is kind of a strange fact! It’s not clear that “math parsimony” is the same concept as, say, Turing-machine-based Kolmogorov complexity, and it definitely isn’t anybody’s intuitive notion of “simplicity”.
And of course, quite a lot of the “natural messiness” of the world is captured by even simpler Newtonian-mechanics models, although chemistry becomes a kind of nasty black box from a Newtonian perspective.
You are responding as though I said something like “physics doesn’t work at all”, when I actually said it works via idealisations and approximations. To talk of Effective Field Theories concedes my point, since EFTs are by definition approximations .
You said “extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on”. That’s a pretty different ballpark than, say, every phenomenon any human before the 1990s had any knowledge of, in more detail than you can see under any microscope (except gravity).
Do you consider everything you’ve experienced in your entire life to have happened in “extremely simplified and idealised situations”?
(This is partly a response to the comment above, but I got kind of carried away.)
The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everyday life (except gravity) in ridiculous detail, including all the “natural messiness” you have in mind (except gravity). It consists of some simple and unique (but mathematically tricky) assumptions called “quantum field theory” and “relativity”, plus the following details, which completely specify the theory:
* the gauge group is SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) (or “the product of the three simplest things you could write down”)
* the matter particles break parity symmetry, using the simplest set of charges that works
* there are three copies of each matter particle
* there is also a scalar doublet
* the 20ish real-valued parameters implied by the above list have values which you can find by doing 20ish experiments.
I dare anybody to give a specification of, say, all of known organic chemistry or geology with a list that short. You don’t need to spell out any mathematical details, so long as a mathematician could plausibly have invented it without being inspired by physical reality (which are the rules I’m playing by in this comment—I think QFT, relativity, and concepts like “gauge group” and “parity symmetry” that I assume knowledge of are all things math could/would have produced eventually).
In some sense I’m handwaving past the hard part, but I think the remarkable thing about physics is that the hard part is entirely math; if you did enough math in a cave without observing anything about the physical world, you would emerge with the kind of perspective from which the known laws of physics (except gravity) seem extremely parsimonious. (Gravity is also parsimonious but sort of stands alone for now.) On the other hand, if you go do a lot of experiments instead, the laws of physics will seem bizarre and complicated. Which I admit is kind of a strange fact! It’s not clear that “math parsimony” is the same concept as, say, Turing-machine-based Kolmogorov complexity, and it definitely isn’t anybody’s intuitive notion of “simplicity”.
And of course, quite a lot of the “natural messiness” of the world is captured by even simpler Newtonian-mechanics models, although chemistry becomes a kind of nasty black box from a Newtonian perspective.
The SM is itself a kludge. It’s not a satisfactory TOE for a bunch of reasons besides gravity.
It is definitely not a TOE, but it is a successful EFT that accounts for everything except gravity/cosmology.
You are responding as though I said something like “physics doesn’t work at all”, when I actually said it works via idealisations and approximations. To talk of Effective Field Theories concedes my point, since EFTs are by definition approximations .
You said “extremely simplified and idealised situations … frictionless planes, free fall in a vacuum, and so on”. That’s a pretty different ballpark than, say, every phenomenon any human before the 1990s had any knowledge of, in more detail than you can see under any microscope (except gravity).
Do you consider everything you’ve experienced in your entire life to have happened in “extremely simplified and idealised situations”?