OH the failings of science...

matthewgar said:

And yet for all intensive purposes they appear to be, though the other theory is that they go through both slits at the same time, that when not observed what happens is all posabilities happen so since they can go through either they go through both. There are alot of oddities with QP that really just don't make sense all the time. Most likly it's due to not fully understanding it, or a problem with our current model.

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shernren said:

Nah. Most scientists, it is true, do tend to hold a more realist view of things intuitively. If you pressed them about it, though, they'd just say they didn't really have an opinion on it one way or another. The philosophers of science like non-realist theories, for some reason or another, and they've come up with quite a few.

If I had to put my money on one, it would be "operationalism". It's a view in which all scientific "realities" are really just shorthand for things that people do. So, for example, when I say "my computer is 3cm thick", I'm not giving a property of reality - I'm just saying that if you line up a properly calibrated (by sociological consensus) ruler with the edge of my computer in such a way and at such a location, then the edge of my computer lines up with the mark on the ruler labeled "3cm". I'm not telling you anything about reality, I'm just telling you about the outcome of an activity which is sociologically deemed to be scientific.

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Chesterton said:

But that contradicts how we understand reality.

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Cabal said:

It's not a contradiction, it's just we're used to perceiving mechanics on a particular scale. Nothing says that has to be "true way" for matter to behave - varying energies lead to phase transitions in the behaviour of matter all the time.

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Chesterton said:

It's not the scale, it's the properties and behaviors of things. Things on that scale behave in ways which things on "our" scale can't and don't behave. The "observer effect", for example, does contradict how we think of reality.

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Cabal said:

That's the point I'm making - what we consider "reality" is based heavily on the action of matter at a particular scale. Why though should that be considered "reality"?

It's just a phase change, dependent on scale and energy - it'd be like saying that steam violates reality because "reality" is where water is wet and liquidy, or that plasma violates reality because "reality" is where atoms usually form solids.

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