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For All Practical Purposes (FAPP) is a pragmatic approach towards the problem of incompleteness of every scientific theory and the usage of asymptotical approximations.
Usually, when a physicist makes an approximation - which can't be justified on rigorous grounds - he tends to justify it by saying that the results obtained are good for all practical purposes (FAPP), meaning that they agree with our experience and approximation errors cannot be detected in practical measurements (for instance, if the error is smaller than the measurement resolution).
FAPP theories are incomplete or lackly-based theories that nevertheless have very high agreement with experiments and tend to be very useful for all practical purposes.
Famous quotes containing the words practical and/or purposes:
“A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)