If a physicist could talk directly with a quark to get hints from it that would help the physicist invent new productive theories and experiments, most physicists would get to work scheduling interviews with any quark willing to talk with them.

Unfortunately, this is impossible, so physicists must rely solely on quantitative methods.

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So far physicists have found the material world to be composed of entities that can be taken as identical, so that what is learned from one example of a type can be applied to all other entities of the same type. Entities recognized by physics do not harbor dissenters. Or maybe dissenters exist, but are rare, uninfluential and reducible to noise.

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When we say the entities of physics are identical, do we know what it means? In respect to the interactions we have with these entities — experiments — they behave predictably.

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The periodic table is a segmentation of substances.

A book describing each element is a sort of catalog of personas.

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(This has been an attempt to dance the ANT.)