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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everything i've seen of it so far is like mean field approximations and stuff like that which, on the one hand, really cool that that even kinda works and, on the other hand like... idk not as elegant as it could be or something?
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yeah makes sense seems genuinely complicated to me too. so many particles. so many interactions. just wack that we know anything at all