In physics, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. If you ignore that planets have their own gravity, or that metals conduct electricity, you’re going to calculate a lot of nonsense. At the same time, as physicists we can’t possibly know everything. Our experiments are never perfect, our math never includes all the details, and even our famous Standard Model is almost certainly not the whole story. Luckily, we have another option: instead of ignoring what we don’t know, we can parametrize it, and estimate its effect.

Estimating the unknown is something we physicists have done since Newton. You might think Newton’s big discovery was the inverse-square law for gravity, but others at the time, like Robert Hooke, had also been thinking along those lines. Newton’s big discovery was that gravity was universal: that you need to know the effect of gravity, not just from the sun, but from all the other planets as well. The trouble was, Newton didn’t know how to calculate the motion of all of the planets at once (in hindsight, we know he couldn’t have). Instead, he estimated, using what he knew to guess how big the effect of what he didn’t would be. It was the accuracy of those guesses, not just the inverse square law by itself, that convinced the world that Newton was right.

If you’ve studied electricity and magnetism, you get to the point where you can do simple calculations with a few charges in your sleep. The world doesn’t have just a few charges, though: it has many charges, protons and electrons in every atom of every object. If you had to keep all of them in your calculations you’d never pass freshman physics, but luckily you can once again parametrize what you don’t know. Often you can hide those charges away, summarizing their effects with just a few numbers. Other times, you can treat materials as boundaries, and summarize everything beyond in terms of what happens on the edge. The equations of the theory let you do this, but this isn’t true for every theory: for the Navier-Stokes equation, which we use to describe fluids, it still isn’t known whether you can do this kind of trick.

Parametrizing what we don’t know isn’t just a trick for college physics, it’s key to the cutting edge as well. Right now we have a picture for how all of particle physics works, called the Standard Model, but we know that picture is incomplete. There are a million different theories you could write to go beyond the Standard Model, with a million different implications. Instead of having to use all those theories, physicists can summarize them all with what we call an effective theory: one that keeps track of the effect of all that new physics on the particles we already know. By summarizing those effects with a few parameters, we can see what they would have to be to be compatible with experimental results, ruling out some possibilities and suggesting others.

In a world where we never know everything, there’s always something that can hurt us. But if we’re careful and estimate what we don’t know, if we write down numbers and parameters and keep our options open, we can keep from getting burned. By focusing on what we do know, we can still manage to understand the world.