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This indeed had happened before and it doesn't matter from engineers' perspective? It was proven that classical mechanics is indeed a facade, most of the time in general usage it is mostly correct, but the calculation result is different to result from general relativity
But billions of existing functional cars also means that we can still use classical mechanics for approximation, until you run into satellite related calculations
This doesn't capture what I'm talking about. Classical mechanics is a very good approximation for relativity when dealing with mass and accelerations that humans generally tend to deal with in everyday life, which is why it was - and still largely is - considered "correct" despite necessarily being inaccurate to the real world. This is very much not the case for the actual IRL examples, where actually studying the underlying science reveals that the things that people are saying don't require mere refinements to get at the truth, but rather have basically no relation. It'd be akin to the discovery that, actually, it's impossible to store or release energy in molecular bonds like in oil. Imagine that were proven beyond any doubt to you, and yet all the world still functions and runs the way that you've perceived it all your life. That'd be utterly mind blowing.
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