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Newtonian physics is good enough for almost everything that humans do. It's not good for predicting the shit we see in telescopes, and apparently it's not good for GPS, although honestly I think without general relativity, GPS would still get made but there'd be a fudge factor that people just shrug about.

For just about anything else, Newton has us covered.





Microchips? A lot of quantum physics is applied here from the top of my mind.

Quantum mechanics is relevant to humanity because we build things which are very small. General relativity is not, because we're more or less incapable of actually doing things on a scale where it matters.

Oh sure, nothing major. Just transistors, lasers, MRI, GPS,nuke power, photovoltaics, LEDs, x-rays, and pretty much anything requiring maxwells equations.

Nothing major.


quantum mechanics (also very much not Newtonian) is much more important to our day-to-day lives.

this kind of distinction is quite stupid in general as plenty of things that we rely on for day-to-day activities such as our houses, desks, chairs, beds, shoes, clothes, etc are all based on Newtonian/classical mechanics. Basically everything that we use which existed pre-transistor strictly speaking only required classical physics.

Is it?

Flash memory (quantum tunneling), lasers (stimulated emission), transistors (band theory), MRI machines (nuclear spin), GPS (atomic transition), LED's (band gap), digital cameras (photoelectric effect), ...the list does, in fact, go on, and on, and on.

Did you intentionally list things that are clearly not essential to day-to-day life?

I'd argue flash memory and transistors certainly are.



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