The Physics of Ignorance

"We don't know everything. The mission of this book is to examine the consequences of this observation for a variety of debates in the philosophy of physics and in philosophy more generally. The examination is timely because over the last few decades, physicists have increasingly understood their own best theories as "merely effective." A merely effective theory is unfundamental, incomplete---yet adept at mimicking the implications of more fundamental theories in its domain of application. Recognizing its best theories as merely effective, contemporary physics acknowledges its own ignorance. But, it hastens to add, there are resources---afforded by the techniques of Renormalization Group approaches---for charting the contours of our ignorance, and for characterizing just how much we understand, in spite of that ignorance. What I try in these pages to do is imagine a philosophy of science that views even our best physics as, in some sense, a physics of ignorance"--