The Midas touch: relativity theory has been used to explain gold’s unique yellow colour (Image: Jim Zuckerman/Alamy)
ARE you ever tempted to ask whether entities such as electrons, black holes or the Higgs particle really exist? As a chemist, I worry about what is real and dependable in my field. Is it the “entities” or the “theories” of chemistry and quantum mechanics that largely explain the periodic table? I also care because all of this goes to the heart of an old, important – and unresolved – debate about how to regard scientific discoveries.
There are two main camps in this debate:…
