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?".
Would you care to offer any estimates of /your/ priors for Bayes, etc? Or what your own inputs or outputs for the overall process you describe might be?
I haven't calculated the longer version yet, but my general impression so far is that I'm around the ~60 deciban mark as my general upper bound for any single piece of knowledge.
I'm not sure I'm even capable of calculating the longer version, since I suspect there's a lot more information problems and more advanced math required for calculating things like the probability distributions of causal independence over individually-uncertain memories forged from unreliable causes in the (presumably very complex) causal graph representing all of this and so on.