Observation Obsession of Modern Physics

Do you believe that what you cannot see or hear does not exist?

Modern physics in the form of quantum mechanics is troubled for several reasons by the fundamental role given to observation including measurement as the expression of an instrumental antirealist view focussing on only what you can see or directly observe/measure, as compared to a wider realist view of what is.  

First, the measurement process is viewed to interfere with the system state being observed/measured, which is the problem of "collapse of the wave function" into a specific result from many possibilities as an effect of the measurement process. This is the observation of a dead or alive Schrödinger cat decided by the process of opening the Schrödinger box. Totally mysterious! 

Second, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that "complementary observables" such as position and velocity/momentum cannot both be measured with precision. Mysterious!

Third, the interpretation of the wave function as a probability is filled with mystery. What is the meaning of making one measurement of a an observable which is a probability? What do you learn by tossing a dice once?

Fourth, focussing on direct observation/measurement leads to the extreme view that the Sun evaporates to nothing when it settles in the evening, only to reappear every morning. Totally mysterious!

This aspect connects to the previous post on the connection between gravitational potential $\phi (x)$ and mass density $\rho (x)$ through the relation $\rho =\Delta\phi$ where $\Delta$ is the Laplacian differential operator with respect to $x$ as Euclidean space coordinate. 

The standard view is to consider mass density to be primordial because we can directly see the Sun, while we cannot directly see the gravitational potential of the Sun. This view comes with the unresolvable problem of instant action at distance. Very troubling!

But if we give up the antirealist instrumental view, then we may consider the gravitational potential $\phi$ to be primordial from which mass density $\rho$ is obtained by differentiation as an instant local operation, which admittedly has mysterious aspects but does not suffer from the unresolvable troubles of the standard view.

Summing up, we have thus found arguments against a philosophy in the spirit of Niels Bohr focussing on what can be measured rather than a wider ontology of what is.