Seeing red

[bennyboy]

This, however, is an irrelevance, because your criticisms do not arise from any misunderstandings of qm that you clearly have.  It's a bit farther down that that.....right at the very bottom, you might say.  Isn't it?  

I asked you for the size of the particle itself, and you know that what you just quoted isn't what I'm getting at. You can talk about the size of a wave packet or an orbital, or the field of influence, etc. etc. But you and I both know that in the article you just linked, there's a reason why elementary particles are called "point" particles. Gotta be careful quoting sources that ultimately give away the game, no?

Lay aside the claim that materialism is insufficient and subsumed by idealism.  Then we'll be able to refer to these explanations coherently.  We could merely suggest that stuff exists....and is made out of ideas.  Couldn't we?  That we're currently doing research at the layer of "stuff"...and have only, possibly, glimpsed at the layer of "existence".In fact I'm certain that you have suggested this, albeit it your own chosen words, and the only reason it was an unproductive line of inquiry was in relation to it's incoherence in light of the aforementioned claim.

If you want to say, as Jorg once seemed to, that "stuff" is ideas at its most elemental level, then we can all shake hands and /thread. But let me say this, "we" are not all scientists, and there are many aspects of human life to which scientific ideas don't very usefully contribute either to our experience of things or to our understanding of it. So I'd say that one of the scopes in which we operate is that of those shared experiences consistent enough to categorize, manipulate, and talk about-- "stuff." And I've never disputed the pragmatism of doing so. As I said, if I want a bridge that stands up, I'll go with the science.