It Started with Copernicus by Keith Parsons

Author:Keith Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Can we entertain the possibility that, all the same, this is some gigantic coincidence? Is it false that the disc is, in fine, in the shape of a labeled grid? Is it a gigantic conspiracy of 13 totally unrelated physical processes that the large scale grid was shrunk to some non-grid which when viewed using 12 different types of microscopes still looks like a grid? To be anti-realist about the grid you would have to invoke a malign Cartesian demon of the microscope. (1985, 147)

René Descartes imagined that there could be an all-powerful demon that so deceived us that we would go wrong no matter how obviously something seemed to be so. Hacking says that in order to remain skeptical about the reality of the things we seem to see through microscopes we would have to postulate such a demon.

Hacking's essay was written nearly three decades ago. Subsequent developments in nanoscience have greatly strengthened his case. Nanoscience studies phenomena at the “nano” scale; a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, far smaller than anything the unaided eye can see. Various devices have been developed to study reality at these scales. Two leading nanoscientists, Mark Ratner and Daniel Ratner, describe the use of “scanning probe” instruments, comparing their operation to the way that we find out about surface textures by sliding a finger over them:

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