" What saves the day for physics ... is the fact that the experimentalist does not accept the Cartesian philosophy, which is to say that he treats his apparatus not as a mathematical structure, but as a perceivable object. Even as there are said to be 'no atheists in the trenches', so indeed there are no bifurcationists in the laboratory. All knowledge of the external world begins in the perceptible realm: deny the perceptible object, and nothing external remains. "

― Wolfgang Smith , The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition