[farming pharmer]

The Standard Model is surprisingly accurate.

So was Newton's until Einstein came along.

[Moonman62]

So was Newton’s until Einstein came along.

...

Or until somebody noticed Mercury’s orbit wasn’t what it was predicted to be.

This anomalous rate of precession of the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit was first recognized in 1859 as a problem in celestial mechanics, by Urbain Le Verrier. His reanalysis of available timed observations of transits of Mercury over the Sun’s disk from 1697 to 1848 showed that the actual rate of the precession disagreed from that predicted from Newton’s theory by 38 (arc seconds) per tropical century (later re-estimated at 43” by Simon Newcomb in 1882).

[ctdonath2]

Everybody wants to be the next Einstein.

[dr_lew]

Yet Newton remains the standard within the practical realm, up to and including interplanetary travel. The Newtonian view has been humbled, no doubt, in having to acknowledge its status as an approximation, but it carries on.