[efavdb]

Agree 100% -- wonderful history here. And with such a simple statement, hard to believe / accept the "reason" is that it works for 633 limiting cases.

[nine_k]

As somebody noticed, we're very lucky to live in a universe where many key things are utterly simple (like basic arithemetics), or allow for acceptable simple approximations (like classical mechanics). There was a sci-fi story set in a world orbiting a binary star, where discovering the laws of celestial mechanics feels like an intractable problem, and even predicting seasons is barely possible.