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Comment on Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophyparent

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I'm currently reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...). A common point he makes is that most scientists operate under an informal paradigm. A paradigm, to Kuhn, are the set of shared understandings and interpretations that are not themselves formal theories.

The importance of such paradigms is that they seem to determine what scientists investigate, and what they're primed to even see. An example Kuhn gives are X-rays. Their discovery caused some consternation, even though their existence did not need a full theoretical overhaul. The consternation was that they were completely unexpected, but they also must have been present in many prior experiments, yet never directly reported.

To directly address your point, scientists are human, and will probably lean one way or another on understanding quantum mechanics. How they lean will influence what sort of questions they investigate, how they investigate it, and what sort of outcomes they will look for.

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