> There is no good reason to introduce confusing and intrinsically incorrect models.
Well, teaching is the usual reason, otherwise physics with trig would all just wait for calculus, and calculus wouldn't get covered before real analysis, etc. Incorrect, or more charitably "useful, prerequisite, & intentionally not rigorous" models are a pretty standard tool for walking students closer to real understanding. Clearly no one is proposing trampolines and bowling balls models because they are expecting to win a Nobel.
> The actual description of gravity isn't hard to understand, it's just really strange.
Hmm, Einstein thought it was pretty hard, and I didn't know that you and Witten had finished quantum gravity or the other latest and greatest.
> Gravity is one of the fundamental forces, there's no recursion in it's definition, indeed we don't "define" it we describe it.
Unpacking this to a first approximation it actually sounds like you're looking for The Truth instead of useful models, that you always know Truth when you see it, that you don't believe that apparently different descriptions can result in formally equivalent stuff. I'm also guessing that you might be strongly inside a "only cares about math because physics" camp whereas I sympathize more with "only cares about physics because math". Lots of interesting conversations in there, but it'll all just be philosophy at that point anyway and you probably wouldn't like it.
Well, teaching is the usual reason, otherwise physics with trig would all just wait for calculus, and calculus wouldn't get covered before real analysis, etc. Incorrect, or more charitably "useful, prerequisite, & intentionally not rigorous" models are a pretty standard tool for walking students closer to real understanding. Clearly no one is proposing trampolines and bowling balls models because they are expecting to win a Nobel.
> The actual description of gravity isn't hard to understand, it's just really strange.
Hmm, Einstein thought it was pretty hard, and I didn't know that you and Witten had finished quantum gravity or the other latest and greatest.
> Gravity is one of the fundamental forces, there's no recursion in it's definition, indeed we don't "define" it we describe it.
Unpacking this to a first approximation it actually sounds like you're looking for The Truth instead of useful models, that you always know Truth when you see it, that you don't believe that apparently different descriptions can result in formally equivalent stuff. I'm also guessing that you might be strongly inside a "only cares about math because physics" camp whereas I sympathize more with "only cares about physics because math". Lots of interesting conversations in there, but it'll all just be philosophy at that point anyway and you probably wouldn't like it.