Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > The Principles of Quantum Theory, From Planck's Quanta to the Higgs Boson: The Nature of Quantum Reality and the Spirit of Copenhagen > Status Update

[Personally I prefer a realist approach, at least on some fundamental level, because its the only way to stop our core correct science from gradually floating away into flights of fancy disconnected from reality. Not only that nonrealist tendencies strengthen the kinds of irrational pushing of fashion in science regardless of empirical reality, such as in string theory, becoming a kind of elitist glass bead game.]

According to the nonrealist argumentation offered by this study, such notions, more radically, bear no resemblance to this reality at all, a reality that in the first place cannot be perceived, but is only assumed, inferred from realities that we can perceive. (This, strangely seems to cross over a lot with the kind of selective subjectivism that Eddington was/is proposing.)

The program and the way of pursuing it harmonize with my argument in this book, applied to quantum theory, especially the point “that the
notions needed to understand perceived reality may bear little resemblance to it.”

..This situation reflects the fact that what happens is unavoidably defined by what kinds of experiments we perform, and how we affect quantum objects, rather than only by their independent behavior, although their independent behavior does of course contribute to what happens.

I briefly recapitulate the nature of this transformation here. The practice of experimental physics does not consist of tracking what happens or what would have happened independently of our experimental technology, but in creating, again, unavoidably creating, configurations of this technology...

As discussed in Chap. 2, Heisenberg’s thinking, thus, revolutionized the very practice of theoretical physics, and it redefined experimental physics as well, or reflected what the practice of experimental physics had in fact already become by that point..

Well no doubt if you have put the numbers in by hand experimentally then the numbers you are going to get will be very accurate!! Given all the theory does is put these numbers in based on their experimental values. The problem is that you have no "confirmation", here of some theory, just description of an empirical procedure with no theory.

...These calculations are, again, experimentally confirmed to a very high degree. As already noted, quantum electrodynamics is the best experimentally confirmed theory thus far..

[The cognitive dissonance here is bizarre. In one sentence he says the experimental numbers are put in by hand, and then in the very next sentence he says this is experimentally confirmed!!!]

(Regarding Renormalisation)

At a certain stage of calculation, however, these integrals are replaced by finite integrals through artificial cut-offs that have no proper mathematical justification within the formalism and are performed by putting in, by hand, experimentally obtained numbers that make these integrals finite, which removes the infinities from the final results of calculations...