Which Fine-Tuning Arguments Are Fine?

Grinbaum, Alexei

doi:10.1007/s10701-012-9629-9

Cited by 27 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Examining the history of quantitative naturalness prescriptions (as is done in [31] and [17]) seems to lend further support to this conclusion. This history reveals that "the acceptable value of [fine-tuning] has drifted up over the years, starting around ∼ 10 and floating towards 100.…”

Section: Conflating These Formal Measures and Their Use In The Physicmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…[31], for example, claims that "[b]ased upon 't Hooft's definition, it could have received a...conceptual foundation similar to that of symmetry," where that conceptual foundation is taken to be partially aesthetic and partially pragmatic (p.616) 23 .…”

Section: Symmetry Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In many such cases, declaring naturalness problems to be aesthetic problems is just a way of declaring them not to be genuine physical problems at all. For example, [31] concludes that the force of naturalness problems stems largely from "down-to-earth sociological factors" in the particle physics community, involving a unique interpretation of formal measures of fine-tuning and heavily influenced by factors like "the choice at the leading universities of professors with a particular taste in physics" and the historically contingent fact that certain physicists who were "the first to fix the arbitrary convention of what is natural and what is not" maintain much influence as a result. Importantly, Grinbaum does not think that naturalness problems have the force of "normal scientific arguments"; they are not, in short, properly physical problems.…”

Section: An Aesthetic Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different measures will, of course, also assign different degrees of fine-tuning. Given the large number of subjective choices that go into quantitatively determining the fine-tuning of a given model, one can already see why one might conclude that "naturalness can at best be understood as a sociological heuristic" [31] (p.627).…”

Section: Conflating These Formal Measures and Their Use In The Physicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This understanding of naturalness has existed in the physics literature for quite some time; indeed, it is clearly stated in some of the earliest discussions of the concept in the late 1970's 3 . However, over time a variety of technical conditions for ensuring naturalness have developed and the understanding of naturalness has shifted in a direction that obscures its physical content (for a historical overview, see [31]). I argue that understanding naturalness in the proposed way illustrates that these superficially discordant technical understandings of naturalness in the physics literature are simply diverse attempts to formalize a shared unease about correlations between widely separated physical scales.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125GeV Higgs

Williams

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in

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The recent discovery of the Higgs at 125 GeV by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC has put significant pressure on a principle which has guided much theorizing in high energy physics over the last 40 years, the principle of naturalness. In this paper, I provide an explication of the conceptual foundations and physical significance of the naturalness principle. I argue that the naturalness principle is well-grounded both empirically and in the theoretical structure of effective field theories, and that it was reasonable for physicists to endorse it. Its possible failure to be realized in nature, as suggested by recent LHC data, thus represents an empirical challenge to certain foundational aspects of our understanding of QFT. In particular, I argue that its failure would undermine one class of recent proposals which claim that QFT provides us with a picture of the world as being structured into quasi-autonomous physical domains.

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Section: Conflating These Formal Measures and Their Use In The Physicmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Symmetry Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Aesthetic Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conflating These Formal Measures and Their Use In The Physicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125GeV Higgs

Williams

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in

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The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence

Landsman¹

2016

The Frontiers Collection

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A mild form of satire may be the appropriate antidote. Imagine, if you will, the wonderment of a species of mud worms who discover that if the constant of thermometric conductivity of mud were different by a small percentage they would not be able to survive. (Earman 1987, p. 314).Abstract Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design, whereas others have felt the need to explain this apparent fine-tuning of the clockwork of the Universe by proposing the existence of a 'Multiverse'. We analyze this issue from a sober perspective. Having reviewed the literature and having added several observations of our own, we conclude that cosmic fine-tuning supports neither Design nor a Multiverse, since both of these fail at an explanatory level as well as in the more quantitative context of Bayesian confirmation theory (although there might be other reasons to believe in these ideas, to be found in religion and in inflation and/or string theory, respectively). In fact, fine-tuning and Design even seem to be at odds with each other, whereas the inference from fine-tuning to a Multiverse only works if the latter is underwritten by an additional metaphysical hypothesis we consider unwarranted. Instead, we suggest that fine-tuning requires no special explanation at all, since it is not the Universe that is fine-tuned for life, but life that has been fine-tuned to the Universe.

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Narratives of quantum theory in the age of quantum technologies

Grinbaum

2017

Ethics Inf Technol

Self Cite

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Quantum technologies can be presented to the public with or without introducing a strange trait of quantum theory responsible for their nonclassical efficiency. Traditionally the message was centered on the superposition principle, while entanglement and properties such as contextuality have been gaining ground recently. A less theoretical approach is focused on simple protocols that enable technological applications. It results in a pragmatic narrative built with the help of the resource paradigm and principle-based reconstructions. I discuss the advantages and weaknesses of these methods. To illustrate the importance of new metaphors beyond the Schrödinger cat, I briefly describe a non-mathematical narrative about entanglement that conveys an idea of some of its unusual properties. If quantum technologists are to succeed in building trust in their work, they ought to provoke an aesthetic perception in the public commensurable with the mathematical beauty of quantum theory experienced by the physicist. The power of the narrative method lies in its capacity to do so.

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Which Fine-Tuning Arguments Are Fine?

Cited by 27 publications

References 53 publications

Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125GeV Higgs

Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125GeV Higgs

The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence

Narratives of quantum theory in the age of quantum technologies

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