Casimir Effect And Scientific Realism

Casimir Effect And Scientific Realism

The Casimir Effect and its Implications for the Scientific Realist/Anti-Realist Debate

It is apparent in Philosophy that there are some questions that have withstood all attempts to answer them in any definitive sort of manner.   Questions that seem to gnaw at our very being, that seem to compel men to dedicate entire lifetimes to try and answer even one facet of them.   Such questions seem to welcome the challenge and enjoy devouring explanations and deductions alike.   As such, one of these questions is the nature of the real, that is to say the question that asks us, “what is real?”   Stemming from this question are two groups of philosophers, the Realists and their counterparts the Anti-realists.   Realists view the world as separate from the cognition of the mind.   If all humanity were to disappear overnight the world, and likewise all the phenomenon associated with it, would continue to operate just as they do today.   Scientific Realists believe that science has an aim to construct an ideal theory for all phenomena in the universe.   Every theory then has to abide by three specific points.   The first of which is that when a theory made to claim something, that claim is either true or false and the theory is true or false depending on whether or not the entities talked about by that theory exist and are correctly described.   For instance, if one proposes a theory that says electrons are blue that theory is dependent on whether or not electrons exist and if they can observe that they are blue.   If they see electrons and they are not blue then that theory is false.   The second portion of the ideal theory is that the entities described by the theory exist objectively and away from mind interpretation.   This can be a tricky caveat, for if the mind is needed to construct a portion of the theory how can we prove that the portion still exists when we remove the mind?   One workaround to this is to have detectors or machines that can recognize a particular phenomena...