Some say we should accept that entities such as atomic particles really do exist. Others bitterly disagree. There is a way out
Are you ever tempted to ask whether entities such as electrons, black holes or the Higgs particle really exist? As a chemist, I worry about what is real and dependable in my field. Is it the "entities" or the "theories" of chemistry and quantum mechanics that largely explain the periodic table? I also care because all of this goes to the heart of an old, important - and unresolved - debate about how to regard scientific discoveries.
There are two main camps in this debate: scientific realism and anti-realism. Scientific realism holds that if science has made great progress by invoking entities such as electrons, then we should take the next step of accepting that they really do exist, that the world described by science is the "real" world. Our present theories are too successful to have happened by chance: somehow we have latched onto the blueprint of the universe.
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