[icen]

My reading of the piece is that it ascribes to the Copenhagen interpretation an anti-realist perspective - that is, the theory is nothing other than the ability to predict the results of experiments. In this view, there is no wave-function in reality: it is just a mathematical tool that appears to predict the dots on the screen well.

Scientific Realism holds that in some sense scientific theories approximate the world, not just in what the experiments observe, but also in the content of their explanations (precisely, you gain knowledge not just about observables, but also non-observables: things that the theory requires to be true, but can't show). The article ascribes this view to Einstein, who presumably thought that there was a such thing as space-time, and it does actually curve under the influence of mass - despite only seeing things that are explained by the curvature, and not the curvature, or the space-time, itself.

The article then goes on to say that the anti-realist approach (dominated by not-undeserving practical concerns and application) focuses on computation: the mathematics is good so long as it gets the right answers in the end, and the end justifies the means. Therefore, it doesn't matter what contrivances must be dealt with in-between: if you get a better prediction, or can do a new exciting thing, then that was always the aim.

Thus, I read the article as advocating a stepping back from this view: it blames this focus on sheer mathematical sophistication as the route to truth as the source of profound disinterest in philosophy by physicists (it is important to note that I think that aeon is a philosophy newsletter!). Earlier and contemporary physicists (prominently, Einstein) had an interest in not just what their theories produced, but what they explained the world to be, and the article decries the modern lack of this.

I recommend the SEP article on scientific realism, which is dense but on a brief reading gives enough of the context to recognise the article. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ (Although it is even more philosophically focused).

NB. I'm not a physicist or philosopher either, so grains of salt! My only self-endorsement is that I spent the last year reading a bit of philosophy, so perhaps I can be at least a stepping-stone to better resource.

[account-5]

Thanks for taking the time, around new years to boot, to explain it better for me; much appreciated.

So my take now is that as long as it works no one is questioning why or how it works. Which is what you'd expect scientists to be doing.

[nelgaard]

You should question how it works. And test whether it works. Or find a simpler theory that works as well. Or a theory that can explain more. Postulating that there must be a better theory is pointless. Bell's theorem was never a pointless philosophical issue. It is physics and that is why it can be tested experiementally.

[nelgaard]

First: no one presumed Einstein to be senile. He was sceptical about qm, and being sceptical is good. He also agreed with Bohr that what mattered was results of experiements. That is why they came up with all those brilliant thought-experiements that could only become real experiements much later. Theories that cannot predict anything in the real world might be interesting, but it is not physics. ( I did study at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen a long time ago)