Sorry if this is a naive question (I am in high school), but why do we always talk about ‘ideal’ stuff in physics? The conditions are not possible in real life so why bother with them, won’t the numerical values not accurately represent real life situations?
Because understanding the behavior of ideals is a building block to understanding the behavior of the complex environment.
Understanding f=ma is a lot easier when it’s a non-relatavistic frictionless sphere in a vacuum, instead of trying to explain all of the tiny complicating factors all at once.
Once you know something is going to drop at 9.8m/s^2 without drag, you can start adding in drag equations and getting to more complex or more accurate answers, and that goes for many of that kind of thing
Make sense, so these ideal equations are just the very base of a phenomenon, and then can be modified to fit different situations?