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?".
One viewpoint I've learned from the skeptical community is that individual experiments have very little value - an experiment with a stated p-value of 0.05 actually has more than a 1-in-20 chance of being wrong. Collections of experiments, however, from a whole field of research, that can provide some valuable evidence; for example, 400 different experiments, of which around 370 lean in one direction and 30 in the other, and there's a noticeable trend that the tighter the experiment, the more likely it is to lean in the majority direction.
What I'm currently trying to wrestle with is that if there are 400 experiments, then even restating their p-values in terms of logarithmic decibans, you can't /just/ add all that evidence up. At the least, there seems to be a ceiling, based on the a-few-in-a-billion odds of extreme mental disorder. I'm currently wondering if a second-order derivative for evidence might be in order - eg, take decibans as a linear measure and work with a logarithm based on that. Or, perhaps, some other transformation which further reduces the impact of evidence when there's already a lot of it.
A larger obstacle to adding them up is that 400 experiments are never going to be independent. There will be systematic errors. Ten experiments in ten independent laboratories by ten independent teams, all using the same, unwittingly flawed, method of measurin... (read more)