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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 11: Particle Physics 2

AGPhil 11.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 17:30–18:00, PTB SR AvHB

Theoretical Virtues and the Pursuit of Ugly Models — •Martin King — MCMP, LMU Munich

The lack of new physics discoveries at the LHC has changed the field of particle physics in a number of significant ways. One is that many of the long-cherished principles, such as naturalness, that guided model development for decades are falling to the wayside. Physicists are increasingly turning to model-independent methods and to models that do not exemplify epistemic theoretical virtues considered by some philosophers as being important or even necessary. Simple, unifying models with large empirical scope, like supersymmetry, are being increasingly passed over in favour of effective models with narrow scope that are relatively easy to assess with existing data. I argue that this is a reasonable response to the current situation and that what should be pursued in this research context are models that are easy to test or that take radically novel approaches.

Keywords: models; bsm physics; theoretical virtues; values in science; particle physics