The paradigm I'm currently looking at this is, generally, the accumulation of evidence over long periods. In the year 1800, not even Dalton had published his (wrong) results about the mass of oxygen; there was no particular evidence /to/ believe in the atomic theory.. In 1900, Einstein had yet to publish his work on Brownian motion; there was still a small but reasonable possibility that somebody would come up with a non-atomic theory that made better predictions. In 2000, atomic theory was so settled that few people even bothered calling it a 'theory' anymore. At any given point during those two centuries, a certain amount of evidence would have been collected relating to atomic theory, and it would have been reasonable to have different levels of confidence in it at different times. In the present-day, the possibility that atomic theory is false is about as small a probability as anyone is likely to encounter - so if I can work out ideas that cover probability estimates that small, then it's probably (ahem) safe to assume they'll be able to cover anything with greater probability.
Or maybe I'm wrong. In which case I don't know a better way to find out I /am/ wrong than to work through the same thing, and come across an unresolvable difficulty.
Or maybe I'm wrong. In which case I don't know a better way to find out I /am/ wrong than to work through the same thing, and come across an unresolvable difficulty.
Well that's a very commendable attitude, seriously.
How much confidence do you place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is made of discrete units, or 'atoms', as opposed to being infinitely divisible?
More than 50%? 90%? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? More? If so, how much more? (If describing your answer in percentages is cumbersome, then feel free to use the logarithmic scale of decibans, where 10 decibans corresponds to 90% confidence, 20 to 99%, 30 to 99.9%, etc.)
This question freely acknowledges that there are aspects of physics which the atomic theory does not directly cover, such as conditions of extremely high energy. This question is primarily concerned with that portion of physics in which the atomic theory makes testable predictions.
This question also freely acknowledges that its current phrasing and presentation may not be the best possible to elicit answers from the LessWrong community, and will be happy to accept suggestions for improvement.
Edit: By 'atomic theory', this question refers to the century-plus-old theory. A reasonably accurate rewording is: "Do you believe 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?".