Interesting idea, but it seems a little badly-defined. Some aspects of quantum physics don’t seem intuitive to me (mostly small details). Does that mean that those details aren’t “real” to me, but they are real to other people?
In a nutshell, yes. That doesn’t make reality subjective, it just means that different people hold different things as real. I’m pretty sure that given a long enough conversation, people would agree on if something is real enough.
To clarify the definition, I’m basically reading the question and post as “Are electrons real objects?” Most of the examples given were about objects, or easily observable things about them, like what’s going around what. Its less of a question of being intuitive, and more one of whether it would be observable given basically magical senses.
This dissolution doesn’t really hold that well for theories. I can be convinced that things are true (like the early chemists who see atoms are yielding good predictions, but not necessarily existing), but without knowing if they’re real.
Something that illustrates this split nicely is the question “Is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle real?” Its certainly true, you can’t be sure of a particle’s position and momentum because as you shorten a photon’s wavelength enough to make the position more certain, you increase the photon’s energy and make the particle’s momentum less certain.
When I learned that, I felt jiffed. “Hey!” my reality-asserting subroutines complained to me “That’s not uncertain at all! It happens to be that in real life you can’t be certain, but if I could observe a particle without light or interacting with it any way using some magical impossible version of sight, it would totally have a definite momentum and position!”
It wasn’t until the teacher demonstrated the unit rearrangement to phrase it in terms of energy and time, and talk about particles going through things that they didn’t have the energy to penetrate for me to be convinced that it was real, and not just an accurate theory.
Interesting idea, but it seems a little badly-defined. Some aspects of quantum physics don’t seem intuitive to me (mostly small details). Does that mean that those details aren’t “real” to me, but they are real to other people?
In a nutshell, yes. That doesn’t make reality subjective, it just means that different people hold different things as real. I’m pretty sure that given a long enough conversation, people would agree on if something is real enough.
To clarify the definition, I’m basically reading the question and post as “Are electrons real objects?” Most of the examples given were about objects, or easily observable things about them, like what’s going around what. Its less of a question of being intuitive, and more one of whether it would be observable given basically magical senses.
This dissolution doesn’t really hold that well for theories. I can be convinced that things are true (like the early chemists who see atoms are yielding good predictions, but not necessarily existing), but without knowing if they’re real.
Something that illustrates this split nicely is the question “Is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle real?” Its certainly true, you can’t be sure of a particle’s position and momentum because as you shorten a photon’s wavelength enough to make the position more certain, you increase the photon’s energy and make the particle’s momentum less certain.
When I learned that, I felt jiffed. “Hey!” my reality-asserting subroutines complained to me “That’s not uncertain at all! It happens to be that in real life you can’t be certain, but if I could observe a particle without light or interacting with it any way using some magical impossible version of sight, it would totally have a definite momentum and position!”
It wasn’t until the teacher demonstrated the unit rearrangement to phrase it in terms of energy and time, and talk about particles going through things that they didn’t have the energy to penetrate for me to be convinced that it was real, and not just an accurate theory.