"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...
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.

This is not the forum for such details of physics, but I feel
compelled to let you know that QM is non-deterministic, but it is
quite strictly causal.

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.)

It usually is enough. There are only very rew instances in which the
statistics are so poor that a deeper analysis is necessary.
Physicists usually try to postpone a final analysis until sufficient
data is available.

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

I agree.
If you are interested in following ir up, try posting to sci.physics.
(Where you have to duck to avoid the emanations of the kooks)

Franz