• 0ops@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don’t need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there’s depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury’s weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein’s relativity and it’s still useful in many not-extreme contexts.

    Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can’t say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that’s just science.

    • Lath@kbin.earth
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      8 months ago

      I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        We noticy it’s effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It’s a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can’t catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.