it is genuinely astonishing how often this works. physicists will literally perform taylor series expansions in a parameter that is like ~1 and somehow this doesn't produce total garbage. completely mysterious to me
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the most based calculation i've ever seen in physics is a statmech calculation that works in "4 - epsilon" dimensions where epsilon is "assumed to be small" (for taylor expansions etc) and then set equal to 1, as a way to guess what happens in 3 dimensions. incredible
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It's worse than you think because some of those theories are defined with structures that require a manifold of a particular dimension.
and of course all the perturbation theory is an asymptotic series i.e. it's known that they probably should not converge
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i gave up on understanding solid-state physics, it’s a complete enigma to me
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even just "It's not a convergent series. Nonetheless..."
physicists are weird
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this is absolutely remarkable, indeed. Even more so when you start moving into biological domains. Taylor-expanded result from some Michaelis–Menten reaction kinetics, and you have predictiveness in the cell, despite the cell not even being well mixed.....!
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Virgin social psych: established methods, lengthy rebuttals to critics, wrong answers.
Chad physics: "irresponsible" use of "dishonest" method, right answer.
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