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 all related to the calculations in the same basic way.
It would seem not. I never saw any connection between entanglement with rocks and alternative universes. Please explain.
There's a simpler model available for discourse here? Well, fascinating. Please explain.
Simpler than what?
Newton's laws are simpler than Newton's laws plus elan vital, and once you understand enough, you realize they make much the same predictions. Ergo, you just explained away elan vital. General Relativity is simpler than Newtonian gravity plus time dilation. Once you get General Relativity, you've explained away time dilation.
...This, by the way, is a very dangerous mentality. Occam's Razor is only a heuristic. New evidence may favor greater complexit
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?