I guess my point is, I have seen how they have convinced a lot of young people that they are learning precise, higher level math and science. However in reality we already had all the precision that is obtainable or provable on earth. You cannot make things anymore accurately with higher math then we were able to do in the sixties.
I guarantee you the math I do is directly descended from math that was being done in the 60's, the 40's, the 10's, the 1890's. And I guarantee you that never have we felt, since the Renaissance, that we have exhausted all of the math there is to be done. It's difficult to see this without knowing higher math. Unfortunately, you don't, so you have to defer to my expertise.
Furthermore, I'm not making any claims that the math we do now is more
precise. In fact, my claims about being able to calculate π precisely come from arguments that are thousands of years old--from Archimedes. This is not new math I'm talking about in this discussion. This is good old fashioned math being done by hand.
I have done that ratio of 22/7 and other ratios that Archimedes had claimed to try. Out many places by hand division. But I just did the 22/7 and it appears that the remainder does in fact just repeat. But if you take the ratio of 286/91 and divide that out you will see that the remainder does change. So without actually doing it, I cannot say whether or not it will repeat forever.
This is the jump you need to make. To you, calculating the decimal expansion of a fraction is sitting down and doing long division until your hand falls off. This will never work, and thinking for some reason it will is delusional--you're human, you're going to die, and the decimal expansion of 22/7 or 286/91 will never stop, so you'll never finish the calculation.
But the answer is staring you in the face and you choose to ignore it: the remainder repeats. If the remainder repeats, then the sequence of division must repeat, and so the expansion must repeat. And the remainder
must repeat because there are only finitely many remainders to a fixed divisor. This is a proof that all rational numbers have repeating decimal expansions.
To you, math is seeing the truth with your own eyes, making the truth with your own hands. To me, math is this
and noticing patterns and making inferences about the way the world must be in order for those patterns to occur. Your math is lacking in abstract thinking.
As for your discussion of other sciences, I cannot comment, because my expertise lies mainly in math. I'll have to defer to you that some of the physical ideas bandied about today are silly; if you want to discuss these things, hop on over to the physics forum. I can't really speak about the change in education--I am a product of the educational reforms you lambast--but I can assure you that whatever "new math" you may be afraid of is no different than the math you learned as a child. If it were, my mathematical world would have come crashing down at some point in my life. It hasn't.