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atoavyesterday at 9:36 AM2 repliesview on HN

Yes, but isn't since exactly about those models? If you want to calculate how much that steel truss is going to bend when loaded, you need basic mechanics. Sure you could go deeper and think about what actually happens to the metallic structure on an atomic level, you could think about the whole thing in relativistic terms, etc. But this is not going to give you a better bridge.

More accurate theories are important once your requirements are so extreme that without them your prediction is off.

Understanding is about knowing these mental models at the different levels, how they connect to each other and where these models have weird gaps and/or disconnects. Since is and always has been about understanding the best current explaination of the things we observe. Whether it is exactly as you say, or some more elaborate hidden structure is beneath it, is not something you can tell apart, unless you run into the actual limitations of your model.

If you want to land on the moon, you use science, even if it doesn't know everything down to the last particle.


Replies

rjswyesterday at 3:55 PM

In reality, CAD systems don't provide data structures that let you describe the behaviour of materials, I feel this sends a hint to designers that they don't need to consider those aspects. I did build this into STEP from the start but CAD vendors and users didn't want to implement it, am currently trying to fix this.

When we use computers for everything, the functionality provided by particular software packages can end up constraining how we think about a problem space.

jdw64yesterday at 9:57 AM

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