"What I meant to get across was that for an adjustment of raw data to be reasonable in this case, they would have to know what every drop of water is doing and why."
This is simply NOT true! ... I'm sorry, it just IS NOT true.
for example,
The gravitational forces from Mars, Mercury, Venus etc etc ALL affect the tides.
AND, if we include these effects we would be slightly more accurate in modelling the tides.. When I say slightly, I mean, the improvement would be in the trillionths of a percent.
Therefore, we just ignore it. We literally pretend they simply don't exist (which is obviously wrong!) We make the argument that since it effects the system by such a slight amount we don't need to include it.
there are literally thousands of other examples.
scientists make approximations all the time. There isn't a single real-world, scientific problem that is solved exactly. The simplest case, a hydrogen atom, which is just 1 proton and 1 electron CANNOT be solved exactly.
I know this because I solved it a long time ago and even with some SERIOUS approximations (they're perfectly valid but the arguments you need are highly complex) it takes about 5 pages of maths.
