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Currently Playing: Let's Learn Physics: The Magic of Small Numbers

Up to this point on our physics journey, we have talked about a lot of exactly solvable systems. These systems are great as examples, but can be a little...boring. So how do we approach systems which are more interesting, but aren't necessarily exactly solvable? One answer is that we can use a mathematical trick known as a Taylor series approximation to get a result which is close enough to the exact result that we can get an idea of the general behavior of the system we care about.