A more recent example involves the postulation of tachyons, 'superluminal' particles which travel faster than light, whose existence was postulated in 1969 solely on the grounds that it was consistent with special relativity.
That is, a case can be made that both the 'super-weak' and 'milli-weak' fields postulated to account for CP-violations are quite analogous in method to the postulation of the time-ordering field.
The postulation of genetically determined key periods for learning suggests how genetic and environmental factors may work together to create patterns of behaviour.
Their explanatory role justified their hypothetical postulation.
This strategy is different from the first two in that it doesn't involve the postulation of an information-transferring contact between human beings and abstract objects.
While it is true that it involves the rejection of absolute space as Newton conceived it, and with it the need to explicate the nature of an enduring space, the postulation of Galilean spacetime poses the parallel question of the nature of spacetime.
This constraint in turn requires the postulation of a three-dimensional field in which the created universe may subsist, a field that Timaeus initially calls the "receptacle (hupodochê) of all becoming" (49a5 6) and subsequently calls "space"(chôra, 52a8, d3).
The move towards a literal spatial interpretation was advanced by the simultaneous postulation in 1874 of a tetrahedral structure for the orientation of carbon's four bonds by Jacobus van 't Hoff (1852 1911) and Joseph Achille Le Bel (1847 1930) to account for optical isomerism (see Figure 4 and section 2.2).
The former mode of explanation, which is associated with the postulation of atoms and the void, employs nothing more than the shapes and motions of fundamental particles and empty interstices interspersed among them.
Second, it affirms his necessity in every sense thus negating the famous doubt of Ibn Kammūna [d. 1284] of the postulation of two necessary existences.
(G VII.378/AG 332) Interestingly, Leibniz uses the principle of plentitude not only to argue against the atomists' postulation of empty space, but also against the possibility of simple indivisible atoms themselves.
