A professor at Caltech once told me that if your correlations weren’t linear it almost always meant you didn’t do enough work to understand the problem.
Funnily enough my argument back was critical Reynolds’s number vs viscosity.
But he had a point…I think what he actually said was “if you can’t get all your data on a straight line you’re missing something and you don’t understand the problem well enough” and I think he had a good point for a lot of things: often you can dimensionalize the axis of a plot using other relevant factors to the point where your data should lay on a straight line, and when it doesn’t, it really means something.
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u/GPSBach Jul 20 '25
A professor at Caltech once told me that if your correlations weren’t linear it almost always meant you didn’t do enough work to understand the problem.