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I'm interested to know of any well-known physics schools or individuals attempting to advance fundamental physics or reinterpret it from a realist standpoint.

Presumably most physicists by contrast are content with an instrumentalist outlook, as summarized at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism, and nothing wrong with that of course. So realist physics studies is more of a niche area bordering on philosophy, or part of it, and therefore hopefully the question is not too broad.

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Engineers. So most research in fluid dynamics for example. – Nick Kidman Nov 24 '12 at 8:53
I've edited the question to exclude applied physics, which wasn't what I meant – John R Ramsden Nov 24 '12 at 8:57
I see. Is realism a clear enough defined term? Then this might end up in a discussion about quantum gravity ..locality or something. I recently read the outlook of the people rewriting quantum mechanics in topos theory language, introducing abstract subobject classifiers (taking the negation of the law of the excluded middle in our world seriously) and they then talk about themselfs as realists. Question: Are the automaton approaches discussed here recently realist? – Nick Kidman Nov 24 '12 at 9:05
At en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism the section titled "Realism and quantum physics" gives an idea of some of the issues, which obviously aren't as clear cut or settled as for classical physics. To answer your question, I suppose one might class a cellular automaton model as realist, if one claimed that was how underlying reality worked. – John R Ramsden Nov 24 '12 at 9:24
(Darn - timed out editing previous comment!) There's another summary of the realism v instrumentalism distinction at tibet.org/dan/madhyamika/mad15.html Another way of putting it, using an IT metaphor, is that instrumentalism is akin to black box testing where one only seeks to determine or verify the visible behaviour of a system without necessarily knowing or caring how it works internally. – John R Ramsden Nov 24 '12 at 9:33
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1 Answer

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I am not really well-known, but otherwise I am such an individual.

Look at the slides of my lectures
Classical and quantum field aspects of light
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/ms/lightslides.pdf
and
Optical models for quantum mechanics
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/ms/optslides.pdf,

at the chapter
10. Models, statistics, and measurements
of my online book
Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras
http://de.arxiv.org/abs/0810.1019,

and at the entries of the chapters
A3: Classical probability
A4: The interpretation of quantum mechanics
A5: The quantum measurement problem
A6: The structure of physical objects
of my theoretical physics FAQ at
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/physics-faq.html

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