Dear Richard Kingsley Nixey,
I like that you begin by discussing intuition. I have heard much too often that "our brains simply didn't evolve to understand such and such...". If you read my last essay you know that I disagree wholeheartedly with this. I also like your statement: "at the very least the anti-reductionist is owed an account of why the intuitions arise if they were not accurate." [I can hear the 'just-so' stories already.] You phrase a tough question: "how do we know it won't unless we keep looking?" and note "... our most formal theories are actually based on what we can't see or certainly don't fully understand... Time? Space-time?"
I have for years more or less ignored "the relativity of simultaneity" that demolished our intuitive understanding of time as universal simultaneity, but have recently had occasion to review the historical development of this idea and I treat this in my current essay. I hope you will read it and comment.
You say "we should all be considering what sort of 'immaterial' media might produce the effects we find, such as 'matter'! The other massive but less visible 'elephant in the room' is what we call 'gravity'. Amen!
You say "...idiom that physics is not about new findings but finding 'new ways' of seeing what we've already found has invariably proved correct with hindsight." For example, few believe that the math of quantum mechanics will change, but the many interpretations of QM will hopefully be supplanted by a "new way of seeing". Similarly, in my essay, I point to a derivation of the Lorentz transform in one inertial frame that offers a different way of seeing what has always been derived in two inertial frames. Of course, "that can't be right is it varies from current adopted theory."
If we had written our essays to support each other I don't think we would have done much differently.
Thanks for your contribution, and your participation.
Very best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman