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Our entire understanding of everything in nature, from elementary particles on upwards, is idealized to one degree or another. If you doubt this, try modeling the behavior of the one electron of a hydrogen atom in a non-ideal way.
The distinction RP is drawing here is between the way physicists tend to think about the atmosphere, in terms of the laws taught in physics textbooks, vs. how climatologists like to get an in-depth understanding of how energy is transported around the atmosphere by following it in mind-boggling detail possibly only with supercomputers. Both are idealized, but in some sense (that I've never seen properly formalized) the former is "more ideal" than the latter. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 14:53, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Idealized and mathematical surely make a tautology. RP is better known for his earlier theoretical work, such as vortex dipoles. This article is concentrating on climate change, which by its nature, is mathematically intractable. I believe RP runs computer models, or at least he used to do that. Computer models can also be regarded as mathematical, although they are an examination of sequences of the absurd, which RP did admit to me, many years ago.203.213.62.69 (talk) 23:46, 6 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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