〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

I don't see how this questions has anything to do with particle physics. You could ask the exact same question regarding ontology by saying "we say an X physically exists"

Yeah the realism debate extends over every science, but a lot of people think that physics is the best candidate for defending realism (given how mature and robust it is)

All we can say is that we observe different properties. We call a perceived coherent collection of those properties an object or "thing". I think it's hard to imagine that properties exist "naked" without an object of which they're properties.

A lot of the trouble with particles (and similar objects) in particular comes with how indirect our measurements are, and how far divorced the physical quantities are from experience (as well as the mathematical artifacts/baggage). I’m personally fond of fields like QFT and...

the like given renormalization. That we’re able to track universality and characterize unknown higher energy contributions (with the flow/couplings) is such a unique result, and a few people are developing variants of realism specific to such theories.

But a lot of the conversation can be modified to the ‘what will survive theory change?’ question, which is another reason why physics is attractive and possibly unique. People like ‘structure’ because we clearly recover the structure of past theories in their appropriate limits.