“It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”33 Einstein’s argument is known to philosophers as the “Duhem-Quine thesis”: in order to extract an experimental result from an observation, it is necessary to understand what is happening during the measurement and how exactly the measurement apparatus and our perception function. “You must appreciate that observation is a very complicated process… Only theory, that is, knowledge of natural laws, enables us to deduce the
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