Mr Heartfield, You obviously do not understand the first thing about the 75-year-old new physics. It reduces your observations here about objectivity in the object itself to heavy handed pronunciamento.
Ever since the Cophenhagen interpretation, philosophers of physics as Mr Schwartz will tell you have struggled with whether objectivity indeed means more than than ability of scientists to agree on the results (or range of possible results) of experiments. You insist that the experimental results have to refer to an objectivity of reality, objective in the sense that *all* experimental results are consistent with the *same* underlying reality. It is this second idea of objectivity which as you should know the Copenhagen interpretation will not allow. With the famous EPR experiments in particular, some have argued for a scrupulous avoidance of the temptation to suppose that the results of two incompatible experiments (two experiments that physically cannot be done at the same time, on the same system) must yield harmonious results. In quantum mechanics, the spin of an electron is genuinely indeterminate--not the same thing as "unknown"--until you measure it, and a person who the spin of one electron of an EPR pair in an up and down magnet has not no way of comparing his result with that of a person who measures the spin of the other electron in a left-right magnet and arrivingat a mutually agreeable account of what the spins of the pair of electrons "really" were. Strong objectivity as you have been touting it cannot be sustained...at least according to the dominant interpretation.
We are thus left with weak objectivity. All scientists can agree on the rules, and can unambiguously agree, when faced by a specified set up, on what can happen and can't happen. But it is no simple matter to go further and declare, as you are in the habit of doing, that the picture of the world yielded by the sum total of all experimental reults on all possible pieces of the world is in fact not just a picture, but really is identical to the objectivity world, something that exists outside of us, and prior to any conception, or measurement we may have of it.
Before you lay down the laws of scientific investigation, why not read a simple introduction to the new physics by Gribbin, Herbert, Polkingham, Hey or best of all Lindley ("Where does the Wierdness Go", part III)?
Warmly, Jan
ps Mr Schwartz is a philosopher. I believe that he was saying that the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics regarding objectivity, determinism, causality, materialism, etc. hardly impinge on our basic conception of ourselves as opposed to, say, Darwinism. Following Cassirer, I tried to suggest some of the pernicious implications of neo Darwinist discourse on our conceptions of our own needs and capacity for action in a post titled needs, if anyone is interested.
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