I myself know nothing at all about quantum theory; and very, very little about classical mechanics; etc. But I do know something about the nature of argument. So a couple of comments on that basis:
Observation vs. theory. It seems to me a mistake to speak of the observation of particles (e.g. the electron, as has been mentioned) as somehow being so separate from quantum theory that the ability to make certain kinds of observations & measurements places the theory in jeopardy. Speech of this sort seems to imply that we are able to observe electrons with our naked senses, thus moving our observations into the realm of hard reality vs. soft theory. From what I read, this isn't the case at all: we can only detect these particles via instrumentation - e.g. cloud chambers, newer devices such as used in
KATRIN, etc. Even without knowing a thing about something like the KATRIN experiment, I am willing to bet there is a long history of mathematical modeling to support detection with these devices. A cloud chamber is not quite the same thing as a pair of binoculars; to know what you are looking at requires more than just naked eyesight. So it is not the case that observation in physics is utterly separate from theory.
Observation leading to theory. To take this an obvious step further, isn't it the case that in the development of quantum theory (as throughout the history of physics and other hard sciences), experimental observation & theory have been interwoven from very early on, rather than being seen as separate and opposed? I apologize for the primitiveness of my sources, but even a glance at
Wikipedia's article on the positron would suggest this: Dirac predicted an "anti-electron" and cloud-chamber observations in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to the detection of what was then called the positron.
The above points lead me to wonder what the arguments in this thread are really about. For example this statement -
- is puzzling. What does "direct access" mean here? What does it mean to say that quantum theory doesn't provide a "mechanism" that "makes sense"? For that matter, getting back to the OP's original complaint, what is really at issue when he notes that the Internet yields hits from various sources which speak of "wave particle duality", and then contends that explanations that this is a dated phrase are not satisfactory?
In my opinion a couple of things are going on:
1) First, in my opinion
@Simon Phoenix is dead on target when he notes that yearning for things to "make sense" and have a "mechanism" reflect our desire for "intuitive pictures" of how reality operates. I think this yearning is made especially powerful if (a) we are daunted by high levels of abstraction, and (b) we ourselves don't entirely understand the theories we are questioning.
2) There is a growing tendency in the era of Google to assume that we can know things through Googling without having to do the work of understanding. So if we get a smattering of Google hits that dredge up confusing or contradictory information, we then assume that this dredged-up information is enough for us to be skeptical about what the experts tell us about a particular theory or model - in this case quantum theory - without our having done the hard, lengthy work of studying that model enough to understand it. If we find ourselves struggling with basic papers in the field, then that might be considered a clue: we are not ready to question that field ourselves!
I am familiar with my point #2 from a different context, which I will offer up as an example of what I mean. About 8 or 9 years ago, I was very interested in a kind of behavioral psychology known as
relational frame theory, or RFT, which purports to explain verbal behavior in humans. RFT is not only extremely technical, but it happens to be built on top of a previous model known as
operant behavior, which is part of B.F. Skinner's
radical behaviorism. I wanted to learn RFT, so I went through an enormous amount of journal articles and books - not only on the development of RFT, but on alternate theories which had been proposed for verbal behavior, but which failed to be born out by experiment as RFT was born out.
Because this was a highly abstruse theory, with many departures from "folk psychology" or "common sense," I had many questions as I read along. From an expert's point of view, these questions were naive; but I still had to ask them in order to gain traction on the subject. I listed them, and then used this list to help guide my reading. Once I felt I had got the "right answer" to each question per the theory, I then queried experts in the field (I knew a lot of the researchers already from early discussions) to make sure my understanding was correct. What I did NOT do was suppose that in my naiveté, I had somehow stumbled across questions that the experts themselves, in developing RFT, had failed to consider.
So to me, the question is, what is the goal of asking a naïve question about a particular theory, whether in psychology or physics? Is it to show that we, in our naiveté, are showing that the experts have it all wrong? Or are we asking as an aid to doing the hard work of studying & learning something new and difficult, so that we may finally understand the theory as it is actually proposed? In this case, I think it is useful for a student to ask something like, "Help me understand why wave particle duality is no longer a problem in QT" or some such; but not so useful for a student to assert that "The availability of 'wave particle duality' as a search term on the Internet, with lots of hits that I haven't really sorted out, means that somehow QT must be inadequate."
The above may sound offensive and if so I apologize; I don't mean to be that way. But it does seem to be that in this thread, we have a division between those who understand a particular theory and its historical development, and are patiently trying to explain these things; and those who for one reason or another are bent on pursuing their own highly personal objections to the theory. One objection is that the Internet coughs up results that to a naïve reader seem important grounds for skepticism; the other is to abstraction itself as being unsatisfactory for explaining a reality that is in any case quite distant from any mental picture we might draw of it - see my note above on "observation vs. theory."
Regarding the first of these objections - the role of the Internet in coughing up seemingly important search results - I would like to quote from a book I have been reading,
The Death of Expertise, 2017 from Oxford U. Press; the author is Tom Nichols, who happens himself to be
an expert on foreign policy & international security. The book is about the general decay of trust in U.S. society in experts and expertise; Nichols has a chapter specifically on the role of the Internet in this loss of trust, and this excerpt is from that chapter:
Plugging words into a browser window isn't research; it's asking questions of programmable machines that themselves cannot actually understand human beings. Actual research is hard, and for people raised in an environment of constant electronic stimulation, it's also boring. Research requires the ability to find authentic information, summarize it, analyze it, write it up, and present it to other people. It is not just the province of scientists and scholars, but a basic set of skills a high school education should teach every graduate . . .
In some ways, the convenience of the Internet is a tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in research and who have some idea of what they're looking for. It's much easier to subscribe to the electronic version of, say, Foreign Affairs or International Security than it is to decamp to the library or impatiently check an office mailbox. This is no help, unfortunately, for a student or an untrained layperson who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of information or the reputability of a writer.
@Dadface, let me finish by saying this: Why not turn your question about "wave particle duality" into a research project? You would have to do a lot of research - lots of long slow difficult reading - but this way, you would get a real grasp on the subject. You could make a note of your questions, then set out to find answers to those questions in the literature. This is how I approached relational frame theory. If I had merely stuck to asking my naïve questions flat-out, with no attempt at study and research, I might have gotten answers from experts on a forum like this; but I couldn't have really understood those answers and so my skepticism would remain. And worst of all I would never really come to understand or learn anything new; I would be stuck within my own self-imposed limits.
