(1) Physics generally seems like a trustworthy discipline—the level of rigor, replicability, lack of incentive for making false claims, etc. So base rate of trust is high in that domain.
(2) There doesn’t seem to be anyone claiming otherwise or any major anomalies around it, with the possible exception of how microscopic/quantum levels of things interact/aggregate/whatever with larger scale things.
(3) It would seem to need to be at least correct-ish for a lot of modern systems, like power plants, to work correctly.
(4) I’ve seen wood burn, put fuel into a car and then seen the car operate, etc.
(5) On top of all of that, if the equation turned out to be slightly wrong, it’s unlikely I’d do anything differently as a result so it’s not consequential to look very deeply into it (beyond general curiosity, learning, whatever).
As a personal convention, I don’t assign probability something is true above 99% for anything other than the very most trivial (2+2=4). So I’m at 99% E=mc2 is correct enough to treat it as true—though I’d look into it more closely if I was ever operating in an environment where it had meaningful practical implications.
(1) Physics generally seems like a trustworthy discipline—the level of rigor, replicability, lack of incentive for making false claims, etc. So base rate of trust is high in that domain.
(2) There doesn’t seem to be anyone claiming otherwise or any major anomalies around it, with the possible exception of how microscopic/quantum levels of things interact/aggregate/whatever with larger scale things.
(3) It would seem to need to be at least correct-ish for a lot of modern systems, like power plants, to work correctly.
(4) I’ve seen wood burn, put fuel into a car and then seen the car operate, etc.
(5) On top of all of that, if the equation turned out to be slightly wrong, it’s unlikely I’d do anything differently as a result so it’s not consequential to look very deeply into it (beyond general curiosity, learning, whatever).
As a personal convention, I don’t assign probability something is true above 99% for anything other than the very most trivial (2+2=4). So I’m at 99% E=mc2 is correct enough to treat it as true—though I’d look into it more closely if I was ever operating in an environment where it had meaningful practical implications.