Term
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Definition
| A process of stripping away details to focus on essential features. |
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Term
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Definition
| A highly simplified picture of reality, but one that still captures the essence of what we want to study. |
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Term
| What are descriptive models? |
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Definition
| Models that explain the essential characteristics and properties of a phenomenon. |
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Term
| What are explanatory models? |
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Definition
| Models that answer why things happen as they do; they have predictive power; they allow us to test - against experimental data - whether a model provides an adequate explanation of our observations. |
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Term
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Definition
| An object that can be represented as a mass at a single point in space. |
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Term
| What is the particle model? |
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Definition
| A simplification in which we treat a moving object as if all of its mass were concentrated at a single point. |
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