I will begin this essay by answering the question and then spend the rest of the treatise extrapolating my many reasons for why I think so.
This paper seeks to establish that it is necessary and desirable to provisionally accept that some as yet visually unobservable theoretical entities of science, such as electrons, exist. However, in order to believe such a claim one must be convinced that the determinations of modern science have provided sufficient adjuvant, circumstantial, indirect evidence as to make such a claim, explanatorily plausible. Confirmatory verificational evidence based upon non-optical observational faculties and senses are judged acceptable as mediated by the inherent cognitive, perceptual powers of the brain.

Man is a creature invested with inquisitiveness. Curiosity is our most valuable characteristic, which sets us apart from the other species and is responsible for the success of our long journey from the cave to Cape Kennedy. Our desire to know more - to look beyond what is recognised as the truth and to what is possible is what separates the modern homo sapien from his primitive homo habilis ancestors. For me curiosity – like sex, morality and linguistic abstraction and reification are bio-genetically driven survivalist mechanisms of the Darwinian paradigm of natural selection.

The paradigm of faith in science, which was characteristic of the Victorian age, has given way to a more sceptical public attitude towards research into questions posed by scientific theories and hypotheses. Many of today’s younger generation tend to deprecate the science that shaped our technological civilization. Such attitudes are often emotionally motivated and are expressed as a scepticism that science can understand and empathise with the human realities that count. The complexity of modern science, particularly in the quantum domain, has become increasingly more remote from folk physics and more difficult to comprehend from a common sense point of view. Various antirealists are sceptical of the persuasive claims, cogency and relevance of some aspects of scientific knowledge.

There is incredulity regarding the actual existence of some unobservable entities that are claimed to be present in the quantum world. Some people also view with suspicion the theories of certain cosmologists, where the existence of some entities are posited blind on the basis of observing the perturbatory behaviour of adjacent entities.

There is also a measure of disbelieve by the non-scientific commonsensical public in sciences increasing insistence that it is only the primary qualities of entities that exist and that the secondary properties are merely adjectivally described value judgements.

For many quantum physicists the primary/secondary demarcation is no more than on the one hand an objective, impersonal, detached approach to an observed entity based upon what properties it has in reality, (charge, spin etc.) Such primary properties can be verified by being repeatedly measured and precisely evaluated irrespective of who is conducting the experiment. One the other hand, secondary qualities are disdained by science as being relatively based, subjective distinctions distorted by emotion or personal bias grounded upon what qualities an object seems to have. (Beauty, value, meaning etc.) Ignoring for a moment the essential function of the lepton family of particles in the existential processes of the natural world, of which the electron neutrino, electron, muon neutrino, muon, tau neutrino and the tau are essential – a world which would not exist at all in the absence of such quantum entities, humankind needs to know as much about them as is possible. Much effort and finance is invested in exploring the quantum domain and for very important reasons. Such knowledge is desirable not only from sheer curiosity, but for reasons of safety regarding the way that we harness such quantum energy. We necessarily require an understanding of the natural environment in which we find ourselves in order for our species to thrive. Knowledge is power and is essential for the survival of mankind in a hostile universe. Modern human culture is heavily dependant upon manipulating the electron for the purposes of electronic communication, energy, medical treatment, transport, lighting, and much else, yet scientists have never seen an electron.

But whatever the scientists tell us, should we believe them when they claim reality exists beyond the appearances of things? Scientific realism says that we should believe in the unobservable objects postulated by our best scientific theories.
The terms observable and unobservable mean different things to different people. Somewhat predictably dictionaries are unhelpful, as they always are with abstractions. They rely on providing definitions that cover all of the main uses and interpretations of meaning of the words without providing a definitive explanation. In most lexicons the term unobservable is rendered as:

Every day we sense, taste, hear, smell, feel and observe entities and the events with which they are associated. With the exception of sight, blind people do the same. We see and record and predict natural events not only with the naked eye, but also from behind the thin lenses of our spectacles, through the thick glass of a submarine’s porthole or its periscope. We observe far-off events through our binoculars, astronomical telescopes, electron microscopes, and the glass of our lounge window and through the rear view mirror of our car. But our optical senses are not the only means we have of observing the world. We can (in accordance with dictionary definitions) discover or determine the existence, presence, or nature of entities without actually seeing them. We have developed instruments for measuring and indicating the qualities, quantities, properties, composition and characteristics of the invisible moving oxygen gases we call wind. We can detect the amount of (visually unobservable) air within a pressurised container by volumetric analysis, the height of a visually obscured mountain or undersea rock by radar.

From the observation of these events and their relation to other events we hold an opinion, make existential statements about visually unobservable entities and have ideas about their consequences.

After careful consideration I believe that we should provisionally accept the reality of the existence of electrons and genes, and any other entity upon the existence of which there is a general consensus of agreement amongst the scientific community.
I stress the word provisionally for I believe that any theory we encounter in this ever-changing world should invariably be approved pro tempore on the basis of a possible future replacement. Such probationary acquiescence may be extended after a suitable review period and regular intellectual stocktaking. In the meantime the theory should held tentatively and be viewed conditionally and doubtfully in the knowledge that one day a more satisfying and possibly more elegant scientific explanation might come along to supplant it.

Considering we have never seen an electron scientists know a tremendous amount about it,

But mathematics is just another language, a superior language for investigating and reconciling scientific data it is true, but we still have not observed the actual electron behind its orbital cloud.

The 3D photographs of the electron-cloud (a homomorphic term used to describe the blurred flight-path of the speeding electron) are truly amazing and very reassuring – but they are not photographs of the actual electron. Our theory of the electron is sufficient to understand electricity and much else about the ubiquitous cosmic entity. We can measure its mass and predict its behaviour in accordance with the inductively observed data.

But are our modern theories concerning unobserved electrons, genes and sundry cosmic entities theory-laden? Does contemporary science inductively seek to derive confirmation of the nature of the electron from recurring, circuitously or indirectly observed confirmatory instances of predictable behaviour? Will the theory of the lepton family be eventually replaced?

Kuhn believed that science goes through what he calls paradigm shifts or recurring revolutions. He calls phase one the pre-scientific phase, the second phase: Normal Science comprising of a paramount theory, which Kuhn named as a paradigm. After a time criticisms, objections and obstacles emerge and eventually someone produces a replacement theory and a paradigm shift takes place.

So might we be unconsciously emulating the paradigm shift that was the fate of the Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy’s theory that the earth was a fixed, inert, immovable mass, located at the centre of the universe, and all celestial bodies, including the sun and the fixed stars, revolved around it? Ptolemy’s wrongful but functional explanation of the puzzling retrograde motion of the planets of 150 AD. was proved to be flawed by Nicolaus Copernicus by bare eyeball methods over a thousand years later in 1530. A hundred years were to pass before the invention of the telescope the Polish astronomers great work De Revolutionibus, introduced the heliocentric model of the solar system which asserted that the earth rotated on its axis once daily and travelled around the sun once yearly.

In my view the eventual emergence of a competitive paradigm is a possibility. I believe Popper was correct in his view that our acceptance of any scientific theory such always be provisional. It follows that on this basis even the holy grail of mathematics might one day be anti-theoretically rather than inter-theoretically replaced.


As Ladyman observed…

Eventually the notion that Euclid’s mathematical Elements were self-evident axioms of geometry was rejected. That meant that non-Euclidean geometries like Riemann’s could replace them and Einstein broke with the tradition dating back 2,300 years and employed the new, non-Euclidean geometry developed by Riemann instead. Thus it is with Riemannian geometry that general relativity is formulated in terms of a geometry of cosmic space (and time) that is curved rather than flat.

Like Ptolemy’s physical realization of the earth-centred universe of a set of nested spheres it is still possible that one day our theory of the electron will be replaced with a new version.

Addressing the problem of (strong) underdetermination Quine noted,

In chapter of Understanding Philosophy of Science Ladyman refers to Alan Musgrave's doctrine of Ideaism, which claims that the immediate of direct objects of perception are no more than ideas in the mind, rather than objects in the external world,

Ladyman notes that Locke, Berkeley and Hume shared this idea and also claims that A. J. Ayer maintained a twentieth century version of Ideaism and mentions Ayers remark that,

But Ayres meaning was a little different. Unlike Berkeley he was not claiming that the exterior objects of the world did not exist and only existed ideationally in his mind.

As Ayer himself made clear,

Personally I am convinced that there is no serious doubts or concerns regarding of the theory of the electron either by the experimental data, nor the body of theory. Neither are there any competing theories of empirical equivalence which deny its existence or provide any cogent alternatives.

For Popper theories are conjectures. No matter how many confirmatory inductive instances are noted, they do not lend weight to an theory. Justification comes from the non-accomplishment of energetic endeavours to prove the theory false.

But, Popper’s critical rationalism must also be tempered with common sense. One does not need to see an entity in order to be aware of its existence. It is sufficient to be able to detect it in alternative ways, with other human senses, with the observation of adjacent entities and their behaviour, with technological equipment that feeds the information indirectly to the human sensorial system and thus to the observer’s judgemental brain for existential evaluation.

Was the scientific community and the worldwide media wrong to accept the sight of the impacting giant rocks as a real event because it was observed through the medium of magnification and then reproduced with the help of non-existent electrons impacting the phosphorus at the rear of their family TV screen? Did the worldwide Television audience who watched the event (after the interval required for the signal to travel the 365 million miles from Jupiter to earth) of the twenty existing entities smash into Jupiter in a cloud of combusting gas and erupting material disbelieve the event as occurred before their very eyes? Was the event they witnessed as recorded on film so imperceptible, so unperceivable – so impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses that they found it impossible to understand?
I think not. And as far as we know, not one person in the world registered their disbelief regarding the celestial event on the grounds that being unobservable by the naked eye; the existence of the Jupiter and the cometary entities was unbelievable.

Using tomography, (because measuring an entity from one angle does not reveal the true shape of the object) and by rotating the molecules in the chamber they were able to build up a three-dimensional picture of the molecular orbital They used a novel combination of X-rays to locate the position of the atoms, and an electron microscope to map the surrounding electrons.
It works much like an optical light microscope except we use a beam of electrons instead of a beam of light.

Prof Spence spoke of their reaction at the sight of their astounding success,
We were very excited we saw this beautiful figure of eight with a dumbbell around it and that was of course a very exciting moment because we knew wed visualised directly the electronic cloud between atoms.


If the present rate of scientific progress is maintained it will no doubt not be long before some higher-powered computerised skiagraphical or other technique to examine the electron and its leptronic conjugates becomes available. What will existential provisionalists like me do then? Will we simply up-sticks and fallback to another existential doubting redoubt from which to issue our probationary existential certifications? I close by repeating that I believe it is necessary and desirable to provisionally accept that some as yet visually unobservable theoretical entities of science, such as electrons, exist.


REFERENCES:
[1] Ladyman. James. Understanding Philosophy of Science. p. 129. 2005. Routledge. 2 park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.OX14 4RN.
[2] WordWeb Dictionary. 2008. Accessed 28.04.2008.
[3] Rohrlich. F. The Theory of the Electron. Thirty-first Joseph Henry Lecture . State University of Iowa. Read before the Society May 11, 1962.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rohrlich.htm
[4] Wikipedia. 2008. Accessed 28.04.2008
[5] Ibid. Accessed 28.04.2008
[6] Griffiths. Iwan. W. J. J. Thomson - the Centenary of His Discovery of the Electron and of His Invention of Mass Spectrometry * School of Applied Sciences, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, UK Review Article. Wiley InterScience. www. interscience. wiley. com Accessed 28.04.2008
[7] Ladyman. James. Understanding Philosophy of Science. pp. 172-173 Routledge. 2 park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.OX14 4RN. 2005.
[8] Quine. Willard. 1953. pp.42-43. (quoted by Ladyman. Understanding Philosophy of Science. p. 129. 2005. Routledge. 2 park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.OX14 4RN.
2005. )
[9] Musgrave quoted by Ladyman. 5.21 p. 140. (quoted by Ladyman. Understanding Philosophy of Science. p. 129. 2005. Routledge. 2 park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.OX14 4RN.
2005. )
[10] Ayre. A. J. Language Truth and Logic. Ch. 5.21 p. 140, (quoted by Ladyman. Understanding Philosophy of Science. p. 129. 2005. Routledge. 2 park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.OX14 4RN.
2005. )
[11] SEDS. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space,
accessed 28.04.2008. seds.org/archive/sl9/sl9.html
[12] Quantum, ABCTV. Electron Cloud. 13 April 2000. Australia’s Premier TV Science program. www. abc. net. au/quantum/ Accessed 28.04.2008