* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_m...
People did not understand how or why they worked, but they switched over to them from the Ptolemaic (Tychonic, etc†) system anyway because the math was easier. It was only later (Newton, Einstein) that we understood the "why" and "how".
† https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
If Kepler's models explained the how and why, why were Newton and Einstein necessary?
Kepler's model predicted the behavior of the planets, and so does Newton's model, but Newton's model is more general, applying not only to planets, but also to apples, cannonballs, trains, and other objects with mass.
Einstein's model is more accurate and precise than Newton's model, especially about the orbit of Mercury. Einstein's model also predicts gravitational lensing (e.g. during eclipses), which Newton's model doesn't.
"Why" questions are very hard for physicists. Generally, when we ask "why" questions, we're asking what prior Event X caused Event Y. But for universal laws, there is no prior event that caused the universal law to be true. The best we get is more generality. Planets orbit the sun for the same reason apples fall to the earth, but we don't know why gravity happens, only how. Magnets resist each other for the same reason the floor is hard, but we don't know why magnetism happens, only how.
Yup:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason
Tao and such are merely biological beings serving biological imperative to survive. Educated as they are they are well aware social society expects them to engage in knowledge role-play to barter for food
The recursive non-fractal nature of reality where "function exits" when a human dies naturally fosters signal attenuation and the formation of new spoken traditions among the future generations
There is no propagating our social ways 100 years into the future. We can only propagate our material outputs. The semantics we define to describe something are lost to time.
The provenance to future people was past people; that's all that matters in the future not how we communicated together now
What? He worked meticulously to match the observations.
I don't understand your claim here at all.
The next guy was Newton - he knew the solutions to a central force problem (thanks to his invention of Calculus - notation for calculating with infinitesimals). Movement with conserved angular momentuum <=> movement with the equal-area property <=> happens for a force ~1/r^2. From that he concluded that the central force is "gravity". The deriveration is simple enough for 1st semester physics student, but you will need to cleverly change variables once or twice to get a familiar integral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_central-force_proble...
Nonsense! It was pilfered.
I'd take Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" here. And I also think there's motivation for why scientists care so much about elegance.
It's an intuition you build pretty early on in science courses in undergrad, somewhat related to Occam's Razor. It's why the optimal packing of 11 squares[1] is so unsatisfying. It flies in the face of all the intuition we've built that simple (and symmetric) solutions are more likely to be true. Machine learning practitioners use this intuition when performing model selection as well: the simpler model (i.e. with fewer free parameters) is less likely to be overfit to the data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing#/media/File:Pac...
> It's an intuition you build pretty early on in science courses in undergrad
> It's why the optimal packing of 11 squares is so unsatisfying.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - but let me just quickly find an alternative representation of the solution that is much more symmetric and satisfying. There, "beautiful"!
Why be careful? What would be wrong with that conclusion (if it's true)? I'm comfortable with arriving at ambiguity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-law-of-natu...
There's the metaphysics problem in that all models are wrong. There's more than one competing version of physics (as will help you read Asimov's argument/rant). There's many valid ways to interpret "why" something happens. Physics is trying to understand the causal change of events so that we can generate a model that makes strong and accurate counterfactual predictions. Were that type of model "complete" would we have answered "why" things happen? Depends which "why" you're asking. You could still proclaim, as Fesser notes, "that's the rules God made", which isn't meaningfully different than "that's the way it is".
As for the PSR I'd claim everything does happen for "a reason". But is that reason always knowable? Certainly not. And arguably my namesake proved that there can't ever be any fully complete physics model.
So why be careful? Because my responses are limited, you must ask the right questions. ;)