Learning not to always trust our senses is a valuable skill that physicists have inherited from the philosophers. As far back as 1641, René Descartes argued in his Meditations on First Philosophy that in order to know things about the material world that were absolutely true, he first needed to doubt everything, often despite what his senses were telling him. This doesn’t mean that we cannot believe anything we are told or shown, but that, according to Descartes, those material things he judges to be true ‘demand a mind wholly free of prejudices, and one which can be easily detached from the
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