Eliezer Yudkowsky

I once met a fellow who claimed that he had experiences as a Navy gunner.

And he said, when you fire artillery shells, you've got to compute the trajectories using Newtonian mechanics.

If you compute the trajectories using relativity, you'll get the wrong answer.

And I, and another person who was present, said flatly, No.

I added, You might not be able to compute the trajectories fast enough to get the answers in time.

Maybe that's what you mean?

But the relativistic answer will always be more accurate than the Newtonian one.

No, he said.

I mean that relativity will give you the wrong answer because things moving at the speed of artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not relativity.

If that were really true, I replied, you could publish it in a physics journal and collect your Nobel Prize.

Standard physics uses the same fundamental theory to describe the flight of a Boeing 747 airplane and collisions in the relativistic heavy ion collider.

Nuclei and airplanes alike, according to our understanding, are obeying special relativity, quantum mechanics, and chromodynamics.

But we use entirely different models to understand the aerodynamics of a 747 and a collision between gold nuclei in the RHIC.

A computer modeling the aerodynamics of a 747 may not contain a single token, a single bit of RAM.

That represents a quark.

So is the 747 made of something other than quarks?

No, you're just modeling it with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the quarks of the 747.

The map is not the territory.

Why not model the 747 with chromodynamic representation?

Because then it would take a gazillion years to get any answers out of the model.