The never-ending conundrums of classical physics

Aurich Lawson

During its teenage and young adult years—what is now referred to as its “classical” period—physics made a lot of mistakes.

In the old physics, mass and energy were separately conserved; particles’ positions and momenta could be arbitrarily specified; gravity acted instantaneously at a distance; the equality of gravitational and inertial mass was just a coincidence; and there was no speed limit. All these ideas and assumptions are now known to be in some way untenable. They're either inaccurate or theoretical dead-ends.

To put it plainly, classical physics is wrong. As such, there's really only one thing to do—physicists have since abandoned the old, mistaken ideas, right? It's reminiscent of how doctors discarded the system of humors, chemists chucked out phlogiston, and astronomers turned away from astrology and geocentrism.