Borrelli, Arianna and Castellani, Elena (2019) The Practice of Naturalness: A Historical-Philosophical Perspective. [Preprint]
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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 ‘80s, with particular attention to the early work of Kenneth Wilson.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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| Additional Information: | Forthcoming in "Foundations of Physics" | |||||||||
| Keywords: | historical contextualization; naturalness; Renormalization Group; Kenneth Wilson; Naturalness; Renormalization Group; Kenneth Wilson; BSM physics | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Field Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
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| Depositing User: | Elena Castellani | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 25 Mar 2019 15:47 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 25 Mar 2019 15:47 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 15848 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Field Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
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| Date: | March 2019 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/15848 |
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