München 2019 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 4: Philosophy of Cosmology IV

AGPhil 4.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 14:45–15:15, HS 10

The naturalness principle and its justification — •Miguel Ángel Carretero Sahuquillo — Bergische Universität Wuppertal

The naturalness principle has had a major role in particle physics during the last decades, in particular in model building. Nowadays, one can find a wide range of different definitions. Some of them seem mutually exclusive, but traditionally its notion has been linked to the fine-tuning problem. In order to palliate it as appears in the Higgs sector of the standard model, new physics should have appeared in the last LHC run. Thus, the persistence of fine-tuning has originated numerous works exploring both, the limits and the different conceptual definitions of naturalness. However, little work has been done re-examining precisely one of the main pillars naturalness advocates: its historical successes.

In this talk I will delineate the two kind of examples used in literature for justifying naturalness based on past instances, namely reconstructions and successes. As the sole success example, the charm quark episode will be reviewed. Exploring the motivations given for its prediction and the later computed mass will allow us to determine whether the charm quark is indeed a good example of a naturalness success, able to trigger further model building based on naturalness. The main conclusion will be a negative answer, which will driven us to claim that the charm quark case should count as a naturalness reconstruction, whose justificatory power is reduced with respect to an actual success.