FAR more so, it turns out, than anybody has ever been willing to admit; even the “good” scientists truly believe they’re being as honest as possible in constructing their models. The manifest wreckage of over 1200 models purporting to accurately simulate the same fragment of Reality, yet being — every one of them — entirely unique...
Succinctly: Models DON’T.
Living in Florida, my personal interest is hurricane forecasting models.
Everybody has seen the multiple ‘spaghetti’ models the Weather Channel and others use when a storm is brewing and after it finally forms, to predict where it will go.
It seems to me that they could take data from years past where an actual hurricane or hurricanes went, from start to finish, then use that data to fine tune a model to replicate the actual data path.
Then test it with other past hurricanes and see what the deviations are and tweak it some more..............
The problem is inherent in any complex dynamic system. Beyond a very low level of complexity, they simply cannot be predicted mathematically with any certainty.
The sad thing is that we knew that long before we developed computers capable of attempting to model these systems. Yet we’ve taken up this lost cause anyway.
George E. P. Box:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”