MB> MB> if perfection is a fiction.  Why all the complex mathematics to
MB> MB> program a space-craft on its way to the moon?
MB> MR> To get "close enough".
MB> MB> Wouldn't chance offer better chances then, if it were not for
MB> MB> perfection?
MB> MR> If it were not for _what_?
Your false dichotomy is that of chance versus perfection.
Relativity best describes what spacecraft do.  Yet NASA's computers
launch the Shuttle using Newtonian equations.  Newtonian physics
beautifully describes what objects do as long as they are not going
at speeds close to the speed of light.  Spacecraft have to have their
clocks adjusted now and then (say, a second per month) because of
relativistic effects, but this is easy to take into account.
MB> It's interesting you believe that we can get "close enough" without
MB> the ideal of perfecting being something to which we use to gauge
MB> "close enough" in the first place!  It is astounding actually; that
MB> any person would assume we can grasp perfection - but we must
MB> know of its existence; for all our getting "close enough" to it.
Your ideas are nice, but whn NASA has to spend $650 million on a
launch, they don't fuck around.  In the real world there is no
such thing as perfection.  You just do the best that you can.
In the space flight biz, people die horribly because of slight
miscalculations.  It's easy to talk about abstractions like
'perfection,' but the people who make the ships fly are more
interested in getting it right.
"Perfection" may be a lovely concept in philosophy or theology,
but in science or technology the only important idea is making
it work.  No Shuttle launch has ever achieved a "perfect" orbit,
but all of them recently have achieved orbits with errors that
are trivially small.  The difference between those two points is
an important philosophical point -- the difference between science
and logic.
 * SLMR 2.1a * HEADLINE: PLANE TOO CLOSE TO GROUND, CRASH PROBE TOLD
--- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 5 Beta
(1:301/45)
---------------