Today's post, Collapse Postulates was originally published on 09 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Early physicists simply didn't think of the possibility of more than one world - it just didn't occur to them, even though it's the straightforward result of applying the quantum laws at all levels. So they accidentally invented a completely and strictly unnecessary part of quantum theory to ensure there was only one world - a law of physics that says that parts of the wavefunction mysteriously and spontaneously disappear when decoherence prevents us from seeing them any more. If such a law really existed, it would be the only non-linear, non-unitary, non-differentiable, non-local, non-CPT-symmetric, acausal, faster-than-light phenomenon in all of physics.
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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 Quantum Non-Realism, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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I propose a theory: It isn't the "strong nuclear interaction" that binds protons and neutrons together, it's actually very tiny little angels that live in between the particles and hold them together. They are also responsible for binding quarks together.
What's that you say? "Invisible fairies" is a complicated hypothesis that needs extra evidence to contend with strong nuclear interaction theory? Well, they are experimentally no different, so you need to directly falsify my angel theory.
What's that you say? The existence of indetectable invisible magical sapient beings that are too small to contain any known possible mind configurations violates some known laws of physics, so our Bayesian prior should be highly weighed against them? Who cares? I'm going to believe in them until you prove that they are experimentally inferior to strong nuclear interaction theory.
(By the way, "Jesus holds atoms together" is genuinely proposed by some.)
By all means, show that your TiLiABiNT theory (tiny little angels binding nucleons together) explains all of the observed nuclear phenomena and predicts as much as the currently popular TiLiRuBaBiNT (tiny little rubber bands binding nucleons together) theory.
No, the onus is on you to show that TiLiABiNT is... (read more)