Related papers: Naturalness as a reasonable scientific principle i…
My aim in this paper is twofold: (i) to distinguish two notions of naturalness employed in BSM physics and (ii) to argue that recognizing this distinction has methodological consequences. One notion of naturalness is an "autonomy of scales"…
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…
The Higgs naturalness principle served as the basis for the so far failed prediction that signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) would be discovered at the LHC. One influential formulation of the principle, which prohibits…
With the discovery of a particle that seems rather consistent with the minimal Standard Model Higgs boson, attention turns to questions of naturalness, fine-tuning, and what they imply for physics beyond the Standard Model and its discovery…
A well-known topic within the philosophy of physics is the problem of fine-tuning: the fact that the universal constants seem to take non-arbitrary values in order for live to thrive in our Universe. In this paper we will talk about this…
The argument from naturalness is widely employed in contemporary quantum field theory. Essentially a formalized aesthetic criterion, it received a meaning in the debate on the Higgs mechanism, which goes beyond aesthetics. We follow the…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Nuclear effective field theories (EFTs) have been developed over the last quarter-century with considerable impact on the description of light and even medium-mass nuclei. At the core of any EFT is a systematic expansion of observables,…
With the Higgs boson discovery and no new physics found at the LHC, confidence in Naturalness as a guiding principle for particle physics is under increased pressure. We wait to see if it proves its mettle in the LHC upgrades ahead, and…
We briefly review the various contexts within which one might address the issue of ``why'' the dimensionless constants of Nature have the particular values that they are observed to have. Both the general historical trend, in physics, of…
Naturalness has for many years been a guiding principle in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, particularly for understanding the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. However, the discovery of the Higgs particle at 125…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
However, the observations encompassed by classical physics excludes the observer from the physical reality, yet the deep-down understandung of nature --{\it the quantum theory}-- can not avoid the intrusion of observer into the measurement…
These notes present a brief introduction to `naturalness' problems in cosmology, and to the Cosmological Constant Problem in particular. The main focus is the `old' cosmological constant problem, though the more recent variants are also…
In recent years, criticism of the methodology of particle physics beyond the Standard Model has increased, diagnosing too much reliance on aesthetic criteria for theory development and evaluation. Faced with several decades of experimental…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…
We review recent results that provide a new approach to the old problem of naturalness in supersymmetric models, without relying on subjective definitions for the fine-tuning associated with {\it fixing} the EW scale (to its measured value)…
The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that…
We provide novel, metatheoretical arguments strengthening the position that the naturalness problem of the light Higgs mass is a pseudo-problem: No physics beyond the standard model of particle physics is needed to explain the small value…