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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 10: Particle Physics 1

AGPhil 10.1: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 15:00–15:30, PTB SR AvHB

Towards a digital analysis of the concept of the virtual particle — •Adrian Wüthrich, Michael Zichert, and Arno Simons — Technische Universität Berlin

The concept of the virtual particle has been the object of lively debates concerning its ontological status and precise meaning of its associated terms. In the spirit of Wittgenstein, we start from the premise that the precise meaning of a term is determined by its use in a community of competent users. We also believe, in turn, that such use is best determined by analyzing as many instances as possible instead of only a few selected cases. Recent tools from the computational humanities have brought such comprehensive analyses within reach. Accordingly, in this talk, we discuss how some of these tools might help us determine the meanings of “virtual particle” and cognate terms on the basis of a large corpus of relevant texts. In particular we will present our preliminary results of a “semantic change detection” analysis. For this, we used contextualized word embeddings of occurrences of “virtual” in all articles of the relevant journals of the “Physical Review” family from 1924 to 2022.

Keywords: virtual particle; digital humanities; realism; concepts