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Shakespeare, information security, Japan

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  A comment on Conversation: Will we ever truly be able to model nature?

  Mar 6 2012: I think we will never have a complete model, but we will always have useful models.
  
  There's a joke by standup comic Steven Wright: I have a map of the United States. It's actual size. It says "one mile equals one mile".
  
  A model is a simplification of nature. It must be complex enough to be meaningful but simple enough to be useful. The actual size map, is a model that perfectly matches the United States but it's of course useless.
  
  A model can be refuted and still prove very useful. We have decisively rejected the earth centered solar system, but in every day life, we use still use it: we say the sun rises and the sun sets. We have refuted Newtonian mechanics but we still use his model when designing cars, calculating ballistic trajectories, etc. It wouldn't be practical to use Einstein's model, unless of course we are dealing with extreme values, where Newton's model breaks down.