Oh, hmm, I thought what he was saying about atoms and light is not that physicists don't study those things, but that they don't study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions, but instead use those words to describe phenomena in the real world and then go on to continue investigating those phenomena on their own terms.

So, for example, "Do radio waves really count as light?" is not a very interesting question from a physics perspective once you grant that both radio waves and visible light are on the same electr... (read more)