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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not. Newtonian physics was 'good enough' until we disproved it. Imagine where we would be if all we had was Newtonian physics.

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You would still make it to the moon (so I've heard). Maybe you wouldn't have GPS systems?

Newtonian physics is good enough for almost everything that humans do. It's not good for predicting the shit we see in telescopes, and apparently it's not good for GPS, although honestly I think without general relativity, GPS would still get made but there'd be a fudge factor that people just shrug about.

For just about anything else, Newton has us covered.

Oh sure, nothing major. Just transistors, lasers, MRI, GPS,nuke power, photovoltaics, LEDs, x-rays, and pretty much anything requiring maxwells equations.

Nothing major.

Microchips? A lot of quantum physics is applied here from the top of my mind.

Quantum mechanics is relevant to humanity because we build things which are very small. General relativity is not, because we're more or less incapable of actually doing things on a scale where it matters.

General relativity is pretty relevant to GPS satellites.

quantum mechanics (also very much not Newtonian) is much more important to our day-to-day lives.

this kind of distinction is quite stupid in general as plenty of things that we rely on for day-to-day activities such as our houses, desks, chairs, beds, shoes, clothes, etc are all based on Newtonian/classical mechanics. Basically everything that we use which existed pre-transistor strictly speaking only required classical physics.

I mean sure, but the transistor is pretty important to the way I live my life now!

I'd argue so is the bed you sleep in every night, and the roof over your head. Best not to take those for granted, as I don't think the transistor would last so long if it wasn't sheltered from the environment.

The argument is that these kind of distinctions between how "classical" and "quantum" physics affects our lives is just a pointless endeavor that even academics don't waste their time with.

Is it?

Flash memory (quantum tunneling), lasers (stimulated emission), transistors (band theory), MRI machines (nuclear spin), GPS (atomic transition), LED's (band gap), digital cameras (photoelectric effect), ...the list does, in fact, go on, and on, and on.

Did you intentionally list things that are clearly not essential to day-to-day life?

I'd argue flash memory and transistors certainly are.

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