they are reverse engineering the universe. sometimes the (almost actual) code doesnt work in edge cases and you need some bandaid.

doesnt mean we necessarily have to rewrite the emulator from scratch.

Ok, when you look at it like this, what physicists are seeing is the first two 1s and the 3, so seeing 1+1 = 3 in nature, and it obviously looks wrong to you, yeah, you try to figure out why it’s there: either (a) we don’t understand math, or (b) we missed something in the equation. Occam’s Razor says we missed something in the equation. So we add another 1 to make it make sense for now while we look for proof that either (a) or (b) are true.

You can also do math like a theologian 1 + 1 + god = 3. Or even simpler 3 gods = 1 god, so 3 gods = 1 god therefore 3 = 1.