  To sum up Pickering’s doctrine: there could have been a research program as successful (“progressive”) as that of high-energy physics in the 1970s, but with different theories, phenomenology, schematic descriptions of apparatus, and apparatus, and with a different, and progressive, series of robust fits between these ingredients. Moreover and this is something badly in need of clarification the “different” physics would not have been equivalent to present physics. Not logically incompatible with, just different.