Presentism and theoretical simplicity

It's oft stated that Ockham's razor favors the B-theory over the A-theory, other things being equal. But the theoretical gain here is small: the A-theorist need only add one more thing to her ideology over what the A-theorist has, namely an absolute "now", and it wouldn't be hard to offset this loss of parsimony by explanatory gains. But I want to argue that the gain in theoretical simplicity by adopting B-theoretic eternalism over presentism is much, much larger than that. In fact, it could be one of the larger gains in theoretical simplicity in human history.

Why? Well, when we consider the simplicity of a proposed law of nature, we need to look at the law as formulated in joint-carving terms. Any law can be formulated very simply if we allow gerrymandered predicates. (Think of "grue" and "bleen".) Now, if presentism is true, then a transtemporally universally quantified statement like:

1. All electrons (ever) are negatively charged

should be seen as a conjunction of three statements:

2. All electrons have always been negatively charged, all electrons are negatively charged and all electrons will always be positively charged.

But every fundamental law of nature is transtemporally universally quantified, and even many non-fundamental laws, like the laws of chemistry and astronomy, are transtemporally universally quantified. The fundamental laws of nature, and many of the non-fundamental ones as well, look much simpler on B-theoretic eternalism. This escapes us, because we have compact formulations like (1). But if presentism is true, such compact formulations are mere shorthand for the complex formulations, and having convenient shorthand does not escape a charge of theoretical complexity.

In fact, the above story seems to give us an account of how it is that we have scientifically discovered that eternalist B-theory is true. It's not relativity theory, as some think. Rather it is that we have discovered that there are transtemporally quantified fundamental laws of nature, which are insensitive to the distinction between past, present and future and hence capable of a great theoretical simplification on the hypothesis that eternalist B-theory is true. It is the opposite of what happened with jade, where we discovered that in fact we achieve simplification by splitting jade into two natural kinds, jadeite and nephrite.

Technical notes: My paraphrase (2) fits best with something like Prior's temporal logic. A competitor to this are ersatz times, as in Crisp's theory. Ersatz time theories allow a paraphrase of (1) that seems very eternalist:

3. For all times t, at t every electron is negatively charged.

However, first, the machinery of ersatz times is complex and so while (3) looks relatively simple (it just has one extra quantifier beyond (1)), if we expand out what "times" means for the ersatzist, it becomes very complex. Moreover on standard ersatzist views, the laws of nature become disjunctive in form, and that is quite objectionable. For a standard approach is to take abstract times to be maximal consistent tensed propositions, and then to distinguish actual times as times that were, are or will be true.