The Plane of Existence

Someone looks into a microscope and sees bacteria. Are the bacteria “real”? Here, like everywhere else, we can only do what we can do. If we, for example, want to kill the bacteria, we can only see whether we are successful by once again looking at the bacteria in the microscope. Now there are, of course, ways to eliminate the bacteria from the image through the lens without eliminating them from the culture. For example, we might remove the slide from the microscope stage. But here again we are doing something that we can do. To demonstrate that the bacteria, though no longer visible through the microscope, still exist, we must use some other doable method. How could we do anything else? Our demonstration that the bacteria, though no longer visible through the eyepiece, are still there, is nothing more than some further procedure that we can do. The scientific reality of the bacteeria is entirely contained in what we can do something with. That real tiny bacteria exist and we see them because the microscope enlarges them is a story hard to doubt, but it is still a story. Everything we know about the bacteria is a conclusion drawn from what we can see, and every argument for their reality is nothing more than pointing at something else we can do.

 

To justify our claim that these invisible bacteria exist or are real to someone else we must do something we can do and show him something that he, and we, can see. The argument that the bacteria are real and invisible is convincing, but it is only an argument that encourages us to imagine something. The invisible bacteria always remain imaginary, no matter how convincing the argument. To say something about them is to say something about what we can see and do. What matters is always something we can do. This imaginary world, no matter how interesting and plausible, is scientifically superfluous and exists only in imagination.

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Tiny objects, quarks or smaller, can not be observed and measured but their existence only deduced from something that we can observe and measure. Such deductions are non-logical as is the deduction of the existence of the electron from the interference of the Maltese Cross. They are conclusions from the characteristics of what physicists have come to call "the classical picture." "If something between A and B prevents a happening at A from being followed by something happening at B then some invisible thing must be blocked from going from A to B" is such a conclusion. This is not a logical conclusion but one drawn from our accepted world picture, the classical view. This non-logical posited invisible has no more bearing on experiments than the visible evidence from which we drew it.