What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

If you think that the Sun is at the center of the solar system, rather than the Earth, you’re likely to conclude that there’s nothing special about Earth, or our solar system, and that there could easily be planets around other stars, even though both astronomical theories give the same predictions about how different lights will move across the sky here on Earth. The story that comes along with a scientific theory influences the experiments that scientists choose to perform, the way new evidence is evaluated, and ultimately guides the search for new theories as well.

I would argue in favor of the widest possible diffusion of knowledge of all the possibilities among physicists. At a time like this, physicists ought to know of all the possibilities, and to feel that while they do not know which of these are correct, they must be ready, if necessary, to abandon even what seemed most secure and beautiful in the old point of view, in favor of what may seem arbitrary and ugly in the new point of view, if this should help explain something.

So Popper is wrong: his theory was not falsified. When the remote continued not to work, he could have rejected his theory about the dead batteries, but he could just as easily have rejected any of his other assumptions about the world. As Quine said, our beliefs about the world can only be tested against the world as a group, not individually, and this holds for falsification just as much as for verification. No theory, in isolation, is falsifiable.

This is incorrect. The theory "my tv didn't turn on because the batteries are dead" is falsified/can be falsified by changing the batteries. The theory "my batteries are dead" can be falsified by using the same batteries in a different device. These are different claims with different falsification tests, which have been conflated here. Popper is not refuted.

Newtonian gravity had been wrong all along—but it took a new theory to displace it, rather than an alleged “falsification.”

That's because it wasn't a falsification, it was not incompatible with the theory (given the plausible possibility of another body exerting a gravitational influence).

it is far from obvious when a theory should be discarded in light of conflicting evidence, rather than rejecting some other assumption used to make the prediction.

Not difficult at all: When the theory is incompatible with the evidence or a different theory provides a better explanation for the evidence.

“Physicists will say, ‘Yes, the Copenhagen interpretation is weird, but so is everything else.’ And you sort of want to slap them and say, ‘No! The Copenhagen interpretation is not weird, it’s gibberish, it’s unintelligible.’”