Physics and Physical Phenomena

You would think these were more or less the same thing, ... but that's not true.

1:21:25 On what is a good theory and on space and time. See The Category Enriched over the Category of Finite Sets, The Finitely Triangulated Manifold and the Magnitude of a Finite Category.

My comment:

21:52 I have been watching Dr Jorge Diaz's videos about the early history of Quantum Mechanics and it is clear from these that what they started with were indeed bona fide physical phenomena, reported in terms of drawings of spectrographs and things. Then the Quantum Theories were put forward, but these theories included 'entities' such as the spin states of free electrons. These things were not physical phenomena, they were part of the theory proposed to underlie the physical phenomena such as Zeeman splitting. So the theory was able to progress in terms of abstract, imaginary properties of physical systems with no clear idea of how or even whether any physical system could meaningfully be said to have such properties. So the idea of an interpretation of the theory came about: meaning that it was an admission that theory thus far was not actually physical, but potentially physical! cf his comment at 52:28 about what isn't classed as physics in academia. At 1:00:51 But if the people working in foundations aren't working in an experimental context, what sort of physics are they doing? 

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Jorge Diaz on the electric Zeeman effect:

See Dr Jorge S. Diaz's History of Quantum Mechanics and Jorge S. Diaz's Series on the Old Quantum Mechanics.

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Here are two examples of physical experiments. One is an observation and the other isn't:

They both have advertisements, I guess because you can't do these sorts of things in academia. See Maudlin's remarks (33:04) about how Maxwell's theory informed Einstein's special relativity and Avshalom Eitzur talking about the Aharonov-Bohm Effect: Physicists Talking About Physics.

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A year or so later Maudlin did an interview on Robinson Erhardt's podcast about special relativity:

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Earlier this year he was talking with Jacob Barandes. See Robinson Erhardt - Tim Maudlin & Jacob Barandes: The Indivisible Approach to Quantum Theory.   

Murray Peshkin talking about the (Electric) Aharonov-Bohm Effect in 2009:

10:24 "How did the electron 'get the message' that the magnetic flux was there?" I think this answer illustrates why the idea that the wave function in configuration space is a ludicrous idea to apply to something that is supposed to be a physically real property of a system, because it means that the 'property' depends upon parts which are not empirically knowable. But this just what physicists (and philosophers of physics) call 'realism'. See David Albert Talking Complete Nonsense.

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The epistemology of this seems more interesting than the ontology: 

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