Comment by Jach

14 years ago

Have you ever read Feynman's Lectures on Physics Volume 2 (Electricity and Magnetism)? One of the things I love about it is that it starts with Maxwell's equations, in their non-simplified form, then goes into the special cases of electrostatics, magnetostatics, and then uniting them into electrodynamics. Feynman goes over the special cases in a way that you never forget that they're in the end incorrect simplifications, there's even a table at the end of the statics section showing "These equations are false, these are true in general."

I don't mind simplified incorrect models so long as they're presented that way (so I don't want to read a "all that stuff we just covered? Yeah it's wrong"-ish sentence after the fact) and the full truth is eventually revealed in an understandable way. I want a full picture of something, not a partial incorrect picture of something, it scares me that some people never stop thinking of an atom as a small planetary system.