Good point, and nothing particularly wrong with it either. I happen to subscribe to a different viewpoint, which is that all of constructs/paradigms/whatevers about particles, space, waves, and “reality” are fundamentally no more than mathematical models that serve us well.
That is, many true quantum physicists (and I don’t include Einstein among them) from the very beginning were uncomfortable with any notion that their theories described some sort of “physical reality”.
It’s more a matter of making models that are internally consistent (ie a result in one place doesn’t contradict other results), do reasonably well at predicting phenomena we can observe and measure, and fit in with other existing models. The models are not the same as reality.
One of my favorite examples is Planck’s equation for black-body radiation. He came up with the idea of “quantizing” the equation not because he thought that was what was going on, but because he perceived that it resulted in an elegant mathematical solution that fit other observations and theories. Only afterwards did anyone ascribe some sort of meaning to the “quanta”.
That, really, defines physics. As much as we’d like to think that we can relate our macroscopic, classical world to the “master” reality, I’m not sure we can. Atoms are not little billiard balls or solar systems, electrons are not little ping-pong balls, and so forth.
What they “are” comes back around to a question of philosophy rather than physics. I argue that to us, as humans, they either have to be solar systems and ping pong balls, or they have to be completely beyond our understanding. At some point, even the most extraordinary genius possible will be unable to go beyond the built-in limitations of our perception of the world, and thus be unable to experience anything more profound than what you and I see.
In that sense, Plato’s idea of forms and essences may be more right than we thought. A fundamentally different reality may be out there, but we do not have any hope of seeing it.
Perhaps a better analogy of it is Neo’s perception of the Matrix in one of the last scenes from “The Matrix” part I, where he sees the agents and the hallway in the green running numbers. He, at least, gets a glimpse of what reality is really like. As humans, we’re eternally stuck within the artificial reality of the Matrix, and our consciousness and perceptions define a state in which we can never see anything else. Or contrariwise, if we could see something else, then we would no longer be human.
For this reason, Niels Bohr was careful to avoid saying that his work “described reality”. He also said, "the universe may not only be stranger than we imagine, it may be stranger than we can imagine.
