The Status of Classical Physics in the Contemporary Scientific Mosaic
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the traditional scientonomic portrayal of theories of classical physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics) as merely used but no longer accepted is too simplistic. To that end, I consider the current status of the meteorological theory, which is accepted as the best available description of atmospheric phenomenon despite the fact that it is founded on the principles of classical physics, including those of Newtonian mechanics. This apparent paradox is resolved if the distinction between a theory’s ontology and its phenomenological laws is properly appreciated. The phenomenological laws of meteorology are accepted by the scientific community as the best available description of atmospheric phenomena. Yet, this acceptance does not imply that the classical ontology implicit in the current meteorological theory is also accepted. Thus, the modern meteorological theory (as well as many tenets of classical physics) can be said to be accepted as the best available description of the observable atmospheric phenomena even though its classical ontology is no longer accepted.
 Suggested Modifications
 [Sciento-2019-0012]: Accept that while the ontologies of classical theories, such as those of Newtonian mechanics, classical thermodynamics, or classical electrodynamics are no longer accepted by the physics community, their phenomenological claims are still accepted as the best available descriptions of their respective observable phenomena, i.e. as the best available answers to their respective questions.
 Consequently, reject the idea that these classical theories are no longer accepted but merely used.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it