Kant discusses this in the Critique of Pure Reason, when he talks about the difference between perception of things, and 'Things in Themselves', and the difference between the two.

Stenger's take is interesting, in that he seems to be building upon the concept of coherency- the extent to which a scientific model builds interesting new questions and answers old questions in a particular field of study. Be interesting to check this out.

Wait a sec... that's not what your typical physicist is doing?

What the heck are they doing?

Stenger doesn't mention Kant (he does briefly mention Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,). I think he may address this idea though (he tackles it through Roger Penrose in a perhaps updated form). He largely rejects it, although it's mostly with a shrug.

"Penrose argues that mathematical truth exists in some kind of external, objective reality of Platonic forms that is not simply a human invention. ... Pointlike particles, wave functions, and indeed space and time themselves may be thought of as living in the Platonic world of mathematical forms, a world separate from the physical world. The existence of such a separate world was suggested to Penrose by the apparent objective nature of mathematical truths.

To which Stenger responds:

This is not inconsistent with the position I have presented in this book. If the principles of physics belong to a separate, mathematical world, then they are not part of the physical world! As I have indicated, the models of physics represent idealized mathematical representations of observational data, formulated to be independent of individual viewpoints and culture -- just like the mathematics of which Penrose speaks. ... Still, we cannot demonstrate the existence of a metaphysical Platonic world by logic or data. If we could, it would be physics and not metaphysics. And we cannot prove atoms and the void, in which Penrose's mathematical and mental worlds are subsumed. All we can argue is that the model of atoms and the void possesses a natural simplicity that the reader might find easier to comprehend. At the very least it provides a simple picture of a comprehensible cosmos that is consistent with all we know from observation and logical analysis.



I may have explained Stenger's take poorly because I don't think that's the take-away. I think the below quote is a good summary of Stenger's goal with the book in his own words:

"Unfortunately, current physical understanding is often formulated in terms of higher mathematics that is as indecipherable to the layperson as hieroglyphs in an Egyptian tomb. No matter how valiantly scientists and science writers may work to express modern models in the vernacular, precise mathematical descriptions and their associated logical deductions can never be satisfactorily reduced to everyday language. Describing physical models in words is like describing great music in words. Just as you have to listen to music to appreciate it, you have to read the equations of physics to grasp their meaning. This has resulted in a sharp division between the "knows" and the "know-nots," drawn at such a very high level of knowledge that it excludes the great bulk of humanity. ... I am trying to show that the existing well-established models of physics can be understood more simply than most people imagine and that they are not filled with unfathomable esoterica accessible only to an anointed few."



Here's what Stenger says (himself quoting Kip Thorne):

(Thorne): "... I shall adopt, without apology, the view that there does exist an ultimate set of physical laws (which we do not as yet know but which might be quantum gravity), and that those laws truly do govern the Universe around us, everywhere. They force the Universe to behave the way it does."

(Stenger): "This is essentially the conventional view. ... In this book I abandon that convention. I will show that the laws of physics are simply restrictions on the ways physicists may draw the models they use to represent the behavior of matter. These models describe scientific observations of an objective reality that surely exists independent of human thoughts. However, their specific forms depend very much on those thoughts. When this fact is recognized, many of the so-called mysteries surrounding modern physics melt away."

To be fair to modern scientists, Stenger is an old dog and may be tilting at an older philosophy. Certainly much of the science popularizes I read nowadays would be much closer to Stenger's view. I can't think of anything I've read recently advocating a strict reality to our models of nature as Thorne described.

The physical world does whatever it does. We as scientists seek to understand what's going on. So we observe. Then we see a pattern in those observations. So we extrapolate out from that pattern until the observations no longer fit the pattern. Then we look for a slightly modified form of the pattern and we do it all again-- over and over again. The more observations under more circumstances we feed into the pattern development, the better the pattern we use mathematics to describe gets. Always we're looking for where the patterns we know break down.

I really enjoyed this somewhat obscure book. The author, while writing from a definite and distinct point of view, takes on the history of Christianity (and Judaism) in an education and amusing way. While I typically delete the book off of my Kindle when I was done, I left this one on as I'm sure I'll want to re-read it and take that information again in.

Just finished this book. Enjoyable read. Light and fluffy like cotton candy