At a risk of reiterating the same argument: You keep agreeing with me and perhaps not realising it.
> incompatible with the rules of the formal model.
Yes. I agree! In many cases this is just means that the statement is "out-of-scope" for the model. That's fine. That however has no bearing on the validity of the statement, unless the model is all-encompassing. Quantum Mechanics is not all-encompassing, it is not a TOE, and this is well known. It's just that people forget this sometimes.
> A particle in QM
Again, you're agreeing with me. The QM model has a notion of particles that is both a mathematical abstraction and a simplification. It's not what the physical world truly does. It cannot "explain" particles.
> obeys the formal structure laid out
So if I were to write a computer program with things in it that obey the same rules, are these things suddenly real, physical particles just like electrons? How about phonons? Holes? Anti-particles?
Particles are abstractions. They're labels humans assign to certain mathematical structures in certain models. Some of them, like leptons, are real things that exist whether or not they're named. Some of them aren't quite as real. Photons are questionable.
Working physicists were surveyed and asked if they think photons are "just a useful abstraction" for orbital interactions or if they're truly real, in the sense that individual photons travel through space like little point particles. They didn't all agree.
Before you argue that I'm wrong somehow, first figure out why theoretical physicists don't agree about such a basic concept.
> Dijkstra had some very biting things
Dijsktra should have known better than to say that, because the converse of this is that it's easy to lose touch with reality by getting too deep in the weeds of abstract algebra.
> incompatible with the rules of the formal model.
Yes. I agree! In many cases this is just means that the statement is "out-of-scope" for the model. That's fine. That however has no bearing on the validity of the statement, unless the model is all-encompassing. Quantum Mechanics is not all-encompassing, it is not a TOE, and this is well known. It's just that people forget this sometimes.
> A particle in QM
Again, you're agreeing with me. The QM model has a notion of particles that is both a mathematical abstraction and a simplification. It's not what the physical world truly does. It cannot "explain" particles.
> obeys the formal structure laid out
So if I were to write a computer program with things in it that obey the same rules, are these things suddenly real, physical particles just like electrons? How about phonons? Holes? Anti-particles?
Particles are abstractions. They're labels humans assign to certain mathematical structures in certain models. Some of them, like leptons, are real things that exist whether or not they're named. Some of them aren't quite as real. Photons are questionable.
Working physicists were surveyed and asked if they think photons are "just a useful abstraction" for orbital interactions or if they're truly real, in the sense that individual photons travel through space like little point particles. They didn't all agree.
Before you argue that I'm wrong somehow, first figure out why theoretical physicists don't agree about such a basic concept.
> Dijkstra had some very biting things
Dijsktra should have known better than to say that, because the converse of this is that it's easy to lose touch with reality by getting too deep in the weeds of abstract algebra.