> Approximations aren't "wrong", they are just simplifications of something less wrong, usually in certain corner cases.
I think it’s true that wrongness is relative to the use-case. But, on the other hand, before things like the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the Michelson-Morley experiment, a lot of physicists thought they had the big picture of the universe basically right and just had to fill in the details. The revolution of GR and QM was barely even suspected and this should give us pause when it comes to our confidence in the modern picture of the universe. Relativity and QM will always be useful as models of the spheres they model, but the worldview we’ve built on top of them could change drastically overnight (in historical terms).
I think it’s true that wrongness is relative to the use-case. But, on the other hand, before things like the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the Michelson-Morley experiment, a lot of physicists thought they had the big picture of the universe basically right and just had to fill in the details. The revolution of GR and QM was barely even suspected and this should give us pause when it comes to our confidence in the modern picture of the universe. Relativity and QM will always be useful as models of the spheres they model, but the worldview we’ve built on top of them could change drastically overnight (in historical terms).