Experimental realism

Ian Hacking s philosophy of experimental realism integrated the epistemological sensibilities of the new empiricism into the practice-model of science by severing the theoreticist link between the truth of theories and a realist commitment to the existence of unobservable entities. As a form of entity realism , experimental realism allows experimentalists to be antirealists or instrumental-... 

The degree of realism of these model structures can be assessed by comparison of computed properties with experimental ones. The cohesive energy is, by definition, the difference in energy per mole of substance between a parent chain in its bulk environment and the same parent chain in vacuo, i.e., when all intermolecular forces are eliminated. This difference is readily computed from the minimized... 

The progress undergone in recent years toward a solution of the problem raised by Einstein 1927 has become possible because of two developments (1) A few experimental techniques, in particular, the methods for measuring very short times with good accuracy, have permitted in recent years the execution of several experiments which in their essence are practical versions of the thought experiment proposed and discussed in 1935 by Einstein, Podolski, and Rosen.39 (2) A procedure of analysis of their results has been made possible by the work of Bell40 who has derived in the frame of local realism a relation (the Bell inequality) obeyed by local realistic theories but violated by quantum mechanics. 

Andrew Pickering s pragmatic realism calls for an interactive stabilization of microspic entities such as quarks. See Pickering, Living in the Material World On Realism and Experimental Practice, in The Uses of Experiment, ed. Gooding et al. 

There is, at present, no realistic theoretical model of the effect of geometrical disorder. A proper model must take into account the complicated orientation dependence of the matrix element (K) [63g], as well as the distribution of positions and orientations of the CTM. The simple treatment adopted by the Gaussian Disorder Model predicts a dependence of the prefactor mobility (//q) on the geometrical disorder parameter Z, namely //q oc exp(i2 ) [63a], and this relationship has been used often to analyze experimental data. The comparison of TTA and TAPC at low concentrations disagrees with this prediction, and it appears to be untenable a priori anyway [60b, 63e]. A worthy challenge for future work will be to construct a model with enough realism to have predictive value. Recent reports indicate progress in this direction [641,o]. 

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