One must admit that many physicists would dismiss the sort of question that philosophers of physics tackle as irrelevant to what they see themselves as doing, viz. producing simple, unified, empirically adequate theories about the world. Either these metaphysical questions arise, they would say, as the result of philosophers involving themselves with the technicalities of theoretical physics, which they, the philosophers, never really understand, or it is the physicists themselves who in some cases get side-tracked and ensnared by the temptation to indulge in the subtle sophistry of the philosophers, posing unanswerable questions, a subject where there is no discernible progress, where there is no general agreement on premisses from which an argument could be launched, where every conceivable position has been argued for by some group of philosophers and equally refuted by another group. In short, philosophy, like religion, abounds in isms and schisms, which it is a waste of time to try and sort out. Much better to keep one's nose to the grindstone, and produce good physics, than to indulge in idle fancy and speculation.

These typical reactions of physicists to the philosophy of physics show how deeply the divide between the two cultures still runs, between the hard sciences and the soft humanities. But let us step over the wall, so to speak, and look back at the standpoint of the physicists from the point of view of the philosophers.