Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:52 amI can't make sense of any of this, sounds like thinking from 1900. QM has pretty much shown that things can't be divided into noumena and phenomena.
On the contrary; it's the premise underpinning the various quantum field theories, QED, QCD and Higgs all of which are essential elements of the Standard Model. In essence the common idea is that there is some underlying 'noumenal' quantum field, which is only directly detectable if we hit it hard enough to create a 'phenomenal' particle.
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:52 amI don't really know what mind or interpretation of phenomena or independent is supposed to mean here.
They have reasonably well agreed definitions amongst philosophers and as you say:
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:52 am...we are on a philosophy site. And btw there were many great scientists since Newton who would have been insulted if you told them that science shouldn't also at least try to make sense of the world, just because Newton said so.
There are plenty of scientists who would be insulted just by having a philosopher in the same room. As it happens Einstein took that approach for Special Relativity, and then completely ignored it for General Relativity. Here's something Einstein said shortly after GM was 'confirmed' by Arthur Eddington et al in 1919:
"According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable..."
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk ... ether.html
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:52 amNot everyone wants to just shut up and calculate, for example to quote a Nobel laureate, "Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job of interpreting quantum theory was done 50 years ago".
For the benefit of anyone reading, that was Murray Gell-Mann whose work was pivotal in the development of QCD, and who labelled the constituents of Hadrons 'quarks'.
Indeed Atla, physicists are a very diverse bunch.
Robert Laughlin, another Nobel Prize winner had this to say:
"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories