Douglas_Knight comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 07 July 2012 05:16PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 08 July 2012 09:04:22PM 2 points [-]

I don't think that's the normal use of "conceptual problem."

If physicists believe, as their verbiage seems to indicate, that QED is a real theory that is an approximation to reality, and they compute approximations to the numbers in QED, while QED is actually inconsistent, I would say that is an error and a paradigmatic example of a conceptual error.

What does it mean to interpret an inconsistent theory?