elfdreamer wrote:You really think that the Copenhagen approach is related to and advocating bad science?
From a hard science perspective, it IS bad science.
You may not like their approach to quantum physics, and you may also disagree with them, but Instrumentalism has an advantage: you need to find a way to describe phenomena that you see. It gives us predictive methods that sometimes elude our ability to justify.
That is the bureaucrat's excuse for it, yes. The end justifies the means...they appear to get short-term results more quickly, because they're ignoring the underlying flaws in their hypotheses, and treating disproven theories as proven facts.
But, in the long run, they've produced SLOWER results, because they get things wrong and then build on them, generation after generation, without understanding what their results even were, much less where they actually came from.
Instrumentalism would have us still believing dryads make willow trees magic, and the 6,000 year old earth is the center of the universe. It was the move toward scientific realism that dragged us out of such nonsense.
Take for example Bell's experiment which was meant to combat the hypotheses of the Copenhagen bunch... but when the ability to perform the experiment actually came to be, the results supported the idea of a "collapse" into a specific situation rather than the result having been established before observation.
Along with the dark matter/energy nonsense and the "proof" of black holes that may well be MECOs, this is a great example of what is BAD about scientific instrumentalism:
You say this is circumstantial evidence in support of instrumentalism, but in fact it's a sign of how something can be touted as "proof" when in fact it's just a reverse-engineering of the details of a theory, to fit the observed facts.
Dryads live in willow trees. Wait, scientists have found that willow bark makes people's pain go away, and willow shoots make tomato cuttings grow roots? Now that we think of it, that actually is proof that those dryads are giving life! Sure, we didn't predict it, in fact it contradicts our predictions, but upon looking back, it fits perfectly!
That is instrumentalism.
The quantum world is a headache to think about, but it would be a huge jump to call everyone out who deals with it as a fraud.
Anyone who violates the rules of hard science is, in a sense, a fraud. Their work is only ever accurate by lucky happenstance. This is as true of instrumentalists as of alchemists and astrologers. The difference is simply one of subtlety.
