Professor Peter Vickers peter.vickers@durham.ac.uk
Head of Department
Probably the most dramatic historical challenge to scientific realism concerns Arnold Sommerfeld’s 1916 derivation of the fine structure energy levels of hydrogen. Not only were his predictions good, he derived exactly the same formula that would later drop out of Dirac’s 1928 treatment (something not possible using 1925 Schrödinger–Heisenberg quantum mechanics). And yet the most central elements of Sommerfeld’s theory were not even approximately true: his derivation leans heavily on a classical approach to elliptical orbits, including the necessary adjustments to these orbits demanded by relativity. Even physicists call Sommerfeld’s success a ‘miracle’, which rather makes a joke of the so-called ‘no miracles argument’. However, this can all be turned around. Here I argue that the realist has a story to tell vis-à-vis the discontinuities between the old and the new theory, leading to a realist defence based on sufficient continuity of relevant structure.
Vickers, P. (2020). Disarming the Ultimate Historical Challenge to Scientific Realism. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 71(3), 987-1012. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy035
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 5, 2018 |
Online Publication Date | Jun 28, 2018 |
Publication Date | 2020-09 |
Deposit Date | Feb 6, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 7, 2018 |
Journal | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science |
Print ISSN | 0007-0882 |
Electronic ISSN | 1464-3537 |
Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 71 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 987-1012 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy035 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1339679 |
Published Journal Article
(281 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Accepted Journal Article
(833 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life
(2025)
Journal Article
The Call for a New Definition of Biosignature.
(2023)
Journal Article
Don’t we all believe in scientific facts? Replies to my critics
(2023)
Journal Article
Breakthrough results in astrobiology: is ‘high risk’ research needed?
(2023)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search