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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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2 See the interview with Colin McGinn, in Horgan, John The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 1996) 56–9Google Scholar. McGinn argues that the deep problems of philosophy (and presumably science as well) could be forever beyond human capability. I will leave unspoken the obvious retort.
3 Lindley, David The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (New York: BasicBooks 1993), 254Google Scholar
4 See Kerszberg, Pierre The Invented Universe: The Einstein-de Sitter Controversy (1916- 17) and the Rise of Relativistic Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon 1989)Google Scholar for extensive documentation of this fact in the case of the development of general relativity.
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7 In standard quantum field theory a number of quantities (such as particle rest masses) are calculated to be infinite, in spite of the fact that they have perfectly definite experimental values. One of the major technical innovations during the 1940s was the invention by Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger and others of a technique called renormalization, which is a consistent way of getting around this problem. Opinion tends to be sharply divided as to whether renormalization genuinely solves the problem of the infinities or is merely a clever dodge. See Teller, Paul ‘Infinite Renormalization,’ Philosophy of Science 56 (1989) 238–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a lucid introduction to the problem.
8 Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critics, Lee, Desmond trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), §29, 42Google Scholar
9 Hacking, Ian Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Experimentation and Scientific Realism,’ in Leplin, Jarrett ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) 154–72Google Scholar
10 As Hacking famously puts it, ‘physicists believe that electrons are real because they can spray them’ (Representing and Intervening, 23); that is, electrons can be used as tools with which to manipulate or influence something else. I am not sure that this can be honestly claimed, as yet, for quarks; hence Hacking's criterion for the reality of entities may be a little more stringent than Redhead's although they both are in the same spirit.
11 Rorty, Richard ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53 (1980) 719–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Moser, P.K. and Nat, A. vander eds., Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), 215Google Scholar
12 One of the most instructive examples of the contrast between the relativist's and the realist's approach is the story of the R101 disaster in Shute's, Nevil memoir Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer (New York: William Morrow 1954)Google Scholar. In 1925 the British Government commissioned a private firm (Vickers) to design and built a prototype passenger-carrying airship, in direct competition with the British Air Ministry's own design team. Vickers produced the R100, a brilliant technical success; the government team, which allowed engineering to be dominated by political considerations, produced the R101, a botched lash-up that crashed on its maiden voyage, killing over 40 persons.
13 Nagel, Thomas The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986)Google Scholar
14 And what is a ‘state’? Mathematically, it is represented by a vector in a complex linear vector space. These vectors are combined in a straightforward Way to give an amplitude for a process to occur; amplitudes (which are complex numbers) may be thought of as a square root of a probability.
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20 The Bell Inequalities turn out to be special cases of the ‘conditions of possible experience’ set forth by George Boole. See Pitowsky, I. ‘George Boole's “Conditions of Possible Experience” and the Quantum Puzzle,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1994) 95–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 This has inspired a spate of puns in the literature, suggested by the phrase. ‘for whom the bell tolls.’
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23 By ‘local observable’ we mean an observable that is fully specifiable in terms of measurements made at a point or very small region of space.
24 The way in which Redhead arrives at this conclusion makes appeal to the KochenSpecker paradox. There is a detailed exposition in Redhead's Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism.
25 The violation of OLOC is sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘contextuality,’ a sort of tamed nonlocality.
26 Pauli, W. ‘The Connection Between Spin and Statistics,’ Physical Review 58 (1940) 716–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Redhead himself has given such a proof; see Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism, 115-16.
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33 Michelson noted the negative result of his own efforts to determine the motion of the Earth through the ether, and conceded that ether theory was in ‘an unsatisfactory condition’ (163). However, he seemed to think that this was merely a technical difficulty that would soon be cleared up by some clever calculation or model within the existing framework.
34 Einstein, Albert ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,’ Perrett, W. and Jeffery, G.B. trans., Annalen der Physik 17 (1905), 37Google Scholar