andrewst_at_onetel.net.uk (Tony) wrote in message news:<c0e3f26e.0405160530.257134c8_at_posting.google.com>...
> "Anthony W. Youngman" <wol_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:<PAu0b6GWsqpAFwSz_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk>...
> > I just find it fascinating that, while we know that Newtonian Mechanics
> > doesn't belong in the set Accurately_Matches_The_Real_World, so many
> > people here (on the grounds of it's mathematical correctness) seem to
> > believe that relational theory does. That argument just doesn't make
> > sense to me.
>
> You keep saying that (on and on, tediously...) but it just doesn't
> work, does it? After all, didn't NASA put a man on the moon using
> Newtonian Mechanics? Expensive and complex successful experiments
> have been done to observe the effects of relativity, but it hardly
> impacts on the real world as lived in by us humans does it? If your
> analogy holds any water at all (to give you the benefit of very large
> doubt), it suggests that relational theory will do just fine for
> pretty much anything we ever want to do "in the real world".
Perhaps more to the point, Newtonian Mechanics is an attempt (accurate
or not) to model "how the world works". By contrast, database theory
(any database theory) is merely trying to come up with the best way to
computerize book-keeping. The two are hardly comparable endeavours,
are they?
Received on Sun May 16 2004 - 13:21:27 CDT
