Because it privileges our -scale- in something the same way we used to privilege our planet and then our sun, as having some special place in the universe, is one answer, and the reason I started looking for alternatives. (Hey, I noticed a trend.)
It's hard to communicate the why - essentially, however, I found a brilliant physicist who was contemporary to the development of the theory who had been working on an alternative explanation which drew on his subject expertise (Johannes Rhydberg). I found him because I had independently came to the same alternative explanation and was looking for the mathematics to prove it out and found his work on hydrogen atoms. (His work is what the mathematics for predictions of what light spectra are emitted by given atomic configurations at given energy levels are based upon)
I haven't sat down to crunch it out, but I'm pretty sure that if you use modern atomic models with a couple minor tweaks, his theories would, for scales above the Planck scale, make the same predictions as quantum physics, and have explanatory power for light frequency emissions, without privileging scale. (Essentially the difference would be that Planck scales of energy are those necessary to shift electrons between shells, if you'll pardon my use of the simpler non-Standard Model model for descriptive purposes, and sub-Planck scales of energy appear as quantum-random Planck-scale events when enough energy gathers or dissipates through sub-Planck emissions to cause Planck-scale events, such as an electron rising or falling a shell - essentially particles "hide" sub-Planck energy levels).
Or, in short, I have the same answer as most crackpots: I find the standard theory inelegant, and have an alternative I prefer.
That's rather better considered than most crackpot theories. What different predictions do you have, and how much data, if any, are you currently defying?
Today's post, Tolerate Tolerance was originally published on 21 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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