The practice of naturalness: a historical-philosophical perspective

DOI10.1007/S10701-019-00287-7MaRDI QIDQ2286547zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Arianna Borrelli, Elena Castellani

Publication date 22 January 2020

Published in Foundations of Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01450

zbMATH Keywords

historical contextualizationKenneth Wilsonnaturalnessphysics beyond the standard modelrenormalization group

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) History of mathematics in the 21st century (01A61) History of quantum theory (81-03) General and philosophical questions in quantum theory (81P05) Renormalization group methods applied to problems in quantum field theory (81T17) Unified quantum theories (81V22) Relativistic cosmology (83F05)

Abstract: The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that it should not be dismissed too quickly, but rather only reshaped to fit new needs. In this paper we argue that present pro or contra naturalness debates often miss an important historical point: that naturalness is essentially a hazily defined notion which, in the course of more than four decades, has been steadily, and often not coherently, shaped by its interplay with different branches of model-building in high-energy physics and cosmology on the one side, and new experimental results on the other side. The paper endeavours to clear up some of the physical and philosophical haze by taking a closer look back at the origin of naturalness in the 1970s and 1980s, with particular attention to the early work of Kenneth Wilson.

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Cites work

• Ken Wilson: solving the strong interactions
• Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125 GeV Higgs
• The case of the composite Higgs: the model as a ``Rosetta stone in contemporary high-energy physics
• The Rise of the Standard Model
• The utility of naturalness, and how its application to quantum electrodynamics envisages the standard model and Higgs boson
• Two notions of naturalness
• Which fine-tuning arguments are fine?

Cited in

(12)

• The `natural' and the `formal'
• The charm quark as \(a\) naturalness success
• Dogmas of effective field theory: scheme dependence, fundamental parameters, and the many faces of the Higgs naturalness principle
• Probing novelty at the LHC: heuristic appraisal of disruptive experimentation
• The utility of naturalness, and how its application to quantum electrodynamics envisages the standard model and Higgs boson
• Why be natural?
• Naturalness, extra-empirical theory assessments, and the implications of skepticism
• Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125 GeV Higgs
• Naturalism, Pictures, and Platonic Intuitions
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3335853 (Why is no real title available?)
• Preface
• Deriving ontological statements from the unnatural Higgs mass

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