Model-dependent realism

Model-dependent realism corresponds to the way we perceive objects.

In vision, one’s brain receives a series of signals down the optic nerve. Those signals do not constitute the sort of image you would accept on your television.

There is a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina, and the only part of your field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of your thumb when held at arm’s length.

And so the raw data sent to the brain are like a badly pixilated picture with a hole in it.

Fortunately, the human brain processes that data, combining the input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. Moreover, it reads a two-dimensional array of data from the retina and creates from it the impression of three-dimensional space. The brain, in other words, builds a mental picture or model.

The brain is so good at model building that if people are fitted with glasses that turn the images in their eyes upside down, their brains, after a time, change the model so that they again see things the right way up.

If the glasses are then removed, they see the world upside down for a while, then again adapt. This shows that what one means when one says “I see a chair” is merely that one has used the light scattered by the chair to build a mental image or model of the chair.

If the model is upside down, with luck one’s brain will correct it before one tries to sit on the chair.

Another problem that model-dependent realism solves, or at least avoids, is the meaning of existence. How do I know that a table still exists if I go out of the room and can’t see it? What does it mean to say that things we can’t see, such as electrons or quarks—the particles that are said to make up the proton and neutron—exist? One could have a model in which the table disappears when I leave the room and reappears in the same position when I come back, but that would be awkward, and what if something happened when I was out, like the ceiling falling in?

How, under the table-disappears-when-I-leave-the-room model, could I account for the fact that the next time I enter, the table reappears broken, under the debris of the ceiling? The model in which the table stays put is much simpler and agrees with observation. That is all one can ask.

In the case of subatomic particles that we can’t see, electrons are a useful model that explains observations like tracks in a cloud chamber and the spots of light on a television tube, as well as many other phenomena.

The electron was discovered in 1897 by British physicist J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. He was experimenting with currents of electricity inside empty glass tubes, a phenomenon known as cathode rays.

His experiments led him to the bold conclusion that the mysterious rays were composed of minuscule “corpuscles” that were material constituents of atoms, which were then thought to be the indivisible fundamental unit of matter. Thomson did not “see” an electron, nor was his speculation directly or unambiguously demonstrated by his experiments. But the model has proved crucial in applications from fundamental science to engineering, and today all physicists believe in electrons, even though you cannot see them.

Quarks, which we also cannot see, are a model to explain the properties of the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Though protons and neutrons are said to be made of quarks, we will never observe a quark because the binding force between quarks increases with separation, and hence isolated, free quarks cannot exist in nature. Instead, they always occur in groups of 3 (protons and neutrons), or in pairings of a quark and an anti-quark (pi mesons), and behave as if they were joined by rubber bands.

The question of whether it makes sense to say quarks really exist if you can never isolate one was a controversial issue in the years after the quark model was first proposed. The idea that certain particles were made of different combinations of a few sub-subnuclear particles provided an organizing principle that yielded a simple and attractive explanation for their properties.

But although physicists were accustomed to accepting particles that were only inferred to exist from statistical blips in data pertaining to the scattering of other particles, the idea of assigning reality to a particle that might be, in principle, unobservable was too much for many physicists. Over the years, however, as the quark model led to more and more correct predictions, that opposition faded. It is certainly possible that some alien beings with seventeen arms, infrared eyes, and a habit of blowing clotted cream out their ears would make the same experimental observations that we do, but describe them without quarks. Nevertheless, according to model-dependent realism, quarks exist in a model that agrees with our observations of how subnuclear particles behave.