Field, Grace E. (2021) Putting theory in its place: The relationship between universality arguments and empirical constraints. [Preprint]
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Abstract
In light of its empirical undetectability, physicists have attempted to establish Hawking radiation as universal—as a phenomenon that should appear regardless of the possible details of quantum gravity, whatever those details might be. But, as pointed out in a recent article by Gryb, Palacios, and Thébault (2019), these universality arguments for Hawking radiation seem broadly unconvincing compared to the Wilsonian renormalization-group universality arguments for condensed matter physics.
Motivated by their apparent failure, compared with the overwhelming success of universality arguments in so many other contexts, I address the question: in which situations should we expect to be able to construct successful universality arguments? In other words, which situations are ‘universality-argument-apt’?
I distinguish between two notions of success for a universality argument: ‘strength’ and ‘relevance’. I argue that we should only expect to be able to construct universality arguments that are successful in the sense of being significantly relevant to a given domain if (1) we know enough about how that domain’s micro-physics is structured, or (2) we are able to empirically test the domain’s macro-behaviour, or if we are in both situations at once. These conditions are useful, most obviously, as a clarification of what universality arguments are capable of. But I argue that they are also useful for two less direct reasons: they clarify the status of analogue experimentation, and thereby show us where we stand in our search for empirical confirmation of Hawking radiation.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | universality; Hawking radiation; analogue experiments; analogical reasoning; universality arguments | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics |
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| Depositing User: | Miss Grace Field | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 31 Dec 2021 20:09 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 31 Dec 2021 20:09 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 20052 | ||||||
| DOI or Unique Handle: | https://doi.org/10.1086/718276 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics |
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| Date: | October 2021 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/20052 |
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