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Old 03-02-2005, 07:37 PM
Nick Maclaren
 
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In article ,
Franz Heymann wrote:

That's true, and entirely understandable. Physicists deal, more often
than not, with such a profusion of clean data compared with folk in
the medical and social sciences that in practice they can afford to be
somewhat cavalier with specifying their confidence limits.


Well, it WAS true in Rutherford's day, but has become decreasingly
less so both theoretically and practically.

The recent (bad) television program reminded people of Einstein's
difficulty in accepting (and even understanding) some really trivial
concepts because they were non-deterministic and (worse) acausal.
Yes, I do mean that quantum mechanics is conceptually trivial; it
is the consequences and details that are not.

And over the years, I have been unsuccessfully trying to get a
glimmer of understanding of uncertainty into the heads of merely
good physicists and similar, when they have got beyond the point that
simple confidence limit amalysis is enough (yes, the best ones can
handle it.)

Perhaps this has got rather off-group, so I shall stop :-)


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.