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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

When chemists were asked, at the end of the 19th century, whether the the atoms in their molecular diagrams were real, they always said, "No, that's just a model we use." It wasn't until Brownian motion needed actual atoms that they began to say atoms had objective reality.

Cosmologists could learn a lot from 19th-century chemists.

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I think there were a lot of chemists at that time who were confident that atoms are real, but an influential group of philosophically-minded physicists (Mach, for one) objected to the claim on the basis that the evidence was circumstantial. They gave Boltzmann a good deal of unnecessary grief over the matter (no pun intended).

Yes, all chemists suspected atoms were real, but they were mostly careful not to claim to have evidence for it that they did not, in fact, have -- yet! Nobody but nobody was surprised when we turned out to really have atoms. It was all a relief, but it didn't change much about how chemistry was conducted. It made catalysis easier to understand, and ultimately DNA as a physical basis for life that made biologists generally very uneasy. Many had thought of themselves as studying something divine, and had to get used to being chemists.

You know what they say. Or at least what Lev Landau supposedly said: "Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt."

It might be cultural. I think it is. Being unsure or humble is not valued as much as it should be.

It is valued more in more consequential fields. What cosmologists believe never has any legitimate effect on public policy, except to the degree that they command budgets for telescopes, accelerators, and detector arrays.

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