So I'm curious as to how experimental results that were consistent with the model somehow "explained away" said model.
Experiments don't explain stuff away. Simpler models do. Also, they have to be consistent with previous observation. Otherwise it's not explaining why it happens; it's just showing that it was wrong in the first place.
Explaining away is when you give a simpler model that has the same results as the more complex ones. You've just explained away the complexities.
(Side note: I do not have a horse in this race; to me both the MWI and the CI are equally fallacious. My personal belief is that no interpretations are necessary at all.)
I think you don't understand the question with this. Do alternate universes exist or not? Does the past exist. Do different places exist? They're all related to the calculations in the same basic way.
Experiments don't explain stuff away. Simpler models do.
There's a simpler model available for discourse here? Well, fascinating. Please explain.
You've just explained away the complexities.
This, by the way, is a very dangerous mentality. Occam's Razor is only a heuristic. New evidence may favor greater complexity over less. General Relativity is more complicated than Newtonian gravitation, for example.
...I think you don't understand the question with this. Do alternate universes exist or not? Does the past exist. Do different places exist? They're a
I am looking for examples of mysterious answers that were eventually explained *away* by science. I can think of two: One is the belief that the behaviour of living things was explained by the mysterious force of elan vital, and not by mere chemistry; which was destroyed by the synthetisation of urea. The other is the special (and mysterious) role of the conscious observer in quantum mechanics, which was explained away by demonstrating that rocks can get entangled with electrons just as much as brains can. Can anyone furnish me with other examples?
I observe in passing that phlogiston is *not* such a mysterious answer. Eliezer is down on it, but I think unjustly so; for people did in fact perform experiments on phlogiston, including the final experiment to find the weight of the phlogiston that had passed out of the burning material and into the byproducts. It turned out that the phlogiston had negative mass... in other words, that the direction of the transfer had been misidentified. But if you think of phlogiston as `negative oxygen', it makes the same predictions as modern chemical theory. This is no worse a mistake than mistaking the direction of the current, a mistake which is *still* enshrined in our sign conventions; it is not a mysterious answer of the form "X->Y" with no details of X given and any value allowed for Y.
However, I digress. Mysterious answers blown away by experiments, anyone?