No more discovery in physics

... Are they valid natural entities...? ... the determination of whether or not a proposed construct is truly a part of the natural world is a problem for scientific work frequently of the most challenging and skillful kind and not a matter to be decided by philosophical generalization." A philosophical generalization: whenever a scientist resorts to hard-sell techniques ("the most challenging and skillful kind"), he is hesitant. Indeed, he should be. Are all cases in which science has told us that a "construct is truly a part of the natural world" correct? To use simple English, is it the case that when ever most scientists assure us, on the basis of ample confirmation, that some thing exists, it does exist? The answer is, obviously, no. How well-confirmed were 'constructs' such as Newtonian action-at-a-distance and light-particles, phlogiston, electric fluids, caloric, radiant heat, all the ethers, the many indi visible chemical atoms, Bohrian orbits and quantum jumps, tau and theta particles how well-confirmed all these 'constructs' were, how much finality was claimed for them, just before their demise, can best be seen from books similar to the present one but written at the peaks of their respective populari ties. The chapter on philosophy of science ends with a touch of Michael Polanyi: non-scientists must trust scientists: scientists trust their total intuitions which cannot be fully conveyed to non-scientists as they cannot be fully articulated. Chapter 4, page 42: Newtonian "explanation is still not complete, since we can ask 'why is there a force...?'" In this sense of incompleteness, every answer is incomplete. Why? Because. ... Why? Because ... and so on ad infinitum. So we need not bother about this inherent incompleteness, it seems. Also, the author (rightly) agrees with Laslo Tisza that physics is not axiomatic, and that this is not such a bad thing. So, no bother again. Page 46. Definition. "A science is complete when it gives as much descriptive details as is desired for the domain of the science and when the theoretical structure of the science satisfactorily explains all the facts of the science." Never mind the ambiguity (e.g. of the domain), the problematic character (e.g. of satisfactoriness), and the circularity (derived from the fact that completeness is itself a desideratum, and thus not definable with respect to other desiderata) ; the chief trouble with this definition is its common sense, and by common sense quantum theory is both complete and satisfactory "in the domain of" atomic spectra. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen will not stand a chance against such a definition, of course. But never mind: this definition is not mentioned again. The chapter on G?del may easily be found to be less satisfactory than almost any existing expositions ; the author is not even careful about object-language and meta-language ; and the 'proof is frankly sketchy. For whom is it presented? It falls between the popular and the rather technical. The evaluation of G?del's theorem (70) for the purpose at hand (i.e. deciding the completeness of science), is Kemeny's : "What we don't know is whether any of the unanswerable ques tions [of G?del's stock] concerns prediction." And there goes the whole chapter. Another problem is the relation of all this to the problem of the possibility of