Review of Thinking about Android Epistemology

This article is a review of Thinking about Android Epistemology by Kenneth Ford, Patrick Hayes, and Clark Glymour. The result of colliding beams of gold traveling near the speed of light ("minibangs") allows physicists to observe the liberation of quarks and gluons from protons and neutrons, revealing conditions that existed at the earliest moments of creation of the universe, thus validating current theories of how the original mix of quarks and gluons phase-transitioned into the mundane soup of protons and neutrons that forms the building blocks of everything. Theoretical and experimental breakthroughs since the 1970s, as well as technological advances in the art of colliding and detecting particles, have made it possible to observe a new "energy frontier," with a wealth of results that will allow a refinement of our theories. The question of the validity of the results obtained is a completely empirical matter. No one would seriously entertain the claim that the results obtained from RHIC are invalid because the results were obtained in an artificially induced laboratory setting rather than as the result of direct observation of nature.