[c1ccccc1]

I mean, we still call it Occam's razor, but I don't think that it's really even the same principle by this point, it just shares the same name. In science today, we don't really care about the number of entities. We don't reject the idea that the stars are suns like our own just because that would imply that the number of atoms in the universe is drastically larger than the number of atoms in the solar system. Instead of hypotheses with the least number of entities, we favour hypotheses with the smallest Kolmogorov complexity. [1] As a slogan for the modern version, I like the phrasing by John Von-Neumann: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

[comex]

Nitpick: The historical problem with stars being suns wasn't (just) the universe being larger than the solar system, but that the telescopic observations available at the time seemed to imply that every other visible star would have to be much larger than the Sun, in fact larger than the orbit of Saturn. This was because early astronomers didn't understand optical diffraction and thought the Airy disks visible around stars were the stars themselves, making their angular radius in Earth's sky seem vastly larger than the reality. [1] Both characterization of the Airy disk and observation of stellar parallax didn't occur until the 19th century, by which point religious objections wouldn't have had the same status as in Galileo's day anyway (for example, Darwin's work was published only a few decades later).

Source: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.612...