Jeremy N Butterfield, Lost in Math? Hossenfelder Review, , 2019 pp. 1-24.
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Jonathan Bain, Why be Natural?, Foundations Of Physics, 2019 pp. 1-17.
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Arianna Borrelli and Elena Castellani, The Practice of Naturalness: A Historical-Philosophical Perspective, Foundations Of Physics, 2019 pp. 1-19.
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B Delamotte, A hint of renormalization, Arxiv.Org, hep-th (2002) 170-184.
An elementary introduction to perturbative renormalization and renormalization group is presented. No prior knowledge of field theory is necessary because we do not refer to a particular physical theory. We are thus able to disentangle what is specific to field theory and what is intrinsic to renormalization. We link the general arguments and results to real phenomena encountered in particle physics and statistical mechanics.
Published in: Am.J.Phys. 72 (2004) 170-184
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Casper Daniel Dijkstra, Naturalness as a reasonable scientific principle in fundamental physics, Arxiv.Org, 2019 1906.03036, physics.hist-ph.
I aim to clarify the physical content and significance of naturalness. Physicists' earliest understanding of naturalness, as an autonomy of scales (AoS) requirement provides the most cogent definition of naturalness and I will assert that i) this provides a uniform notion which undergirds a myriad prominent naturalness conditions, ii) this is a reasonable criterion to impose on EFTs and iii) the successes and violations of naturalness are best understood when adhering to this notion of naturalness. I argue that this principle is neither an aesthetic nor a sociologically-influenced principle. I contend that naturalness may only be plausibly argued to be an aesthetic/sociological principle when formal measures of naturalness and their use in physics communities are conflated with the central dogma of naturalness - the former may indeed be argued to be sociologically-influenced and somewhat arbitrary - but these formal measures of naturalness are in fact less successful than AoS naturalness. I put forward arguments as to why AoS naturalness is well-defined and why it was reasonable for physicists to endorse this naturalness principle on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Up to date, no compelling reasons have appeared as to why the laws of nature should generically decoupling into quasi-autonomous physical domains. A decoupling of scales in the quantum realm is often claimed to be entailed by the Decoupling Theorem (Cao and Schweber (1993)), yet I will show that this theorem is too weak to underwrite quasi-autonomous physical domains in quantum field theories because one should additionally impose that parameters be natural. Violations of naturalness would then have ontological import - unnatural parameters would not be accurately described by EFTs but rather by field theories exhibiting some kind of UV/IR interplay.
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Robert Harlander and Joshua Rosaler, Higgs Naturalness and Renormalized Parameters, Foundations Of Physics, 2019 pp. 1-19.
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S Hossenfelder, Screams for Explanation: Finetuning and Naturalness in the Foundations of Physics, Arxiv.Org, 2018 1801.02176v2, physics.hist-ph (8) p. 447.
We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology. Some other numerological coincidences are also discussed.
Published in: Synthese (2019)
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Heinrich Päs, Physics Beyond the Multiverse: Naturalness and the Quest for a Fundamental Theory, Foundations Of Physics, 85 (2019) 1-15.
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...
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Joshua Rosaler and Robert Harlander, Naturalness, Wilsonian renormalization, and ``fundamental parameters'' in quantum field theory, Studies In History And Philosophy Of Modern Physics, 66 (2019) 118-134.
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Joshua Rosaler and Robert Harlander, Naturalness, Wilsonian renormalization, and “fundamental parameters” in quantum field theory, Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science Part B, 66 (2019) 118-134.
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P Nelson, Naturalness in Theoretical Physics: Internal constraints on theories, especially the requirement of naturalness, play a pivotal role in physics, Synthese, 1985.
Theoretical physics is not what it used to be. In the past few decades, the theories used to describe and explain the small corner of human experience called" physics" have become less determined by experiment than before. Indeed, whole legions of rival theories now give plau sible explanations of the same phenomena. Ultimately, each of these many theories makes testable predictions about the physical world which distinguish it from its competitors? in principle. In practice, today's funda mental theories cannot be fully tested …
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Goran Senjanovic, Natural Philosophy versus Philosophy of Naturalness, Arxiv.Org, 2020 2001.10988, hep-ph.
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 emerged with Galileo and Newton, and led to centuries of unparalleled success in explaining and often predicting new phenomena of nature. I argue here that the long standing obsession with the hierarchy problem as a guiding principle for the future of our field has had the tragic consequence of deviating high energy physics from its origins as natural philosophy, and turning it into a philosophy of naturalness.
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David Wallace, Naturalness and Emergence, , 2019.
I develop an account of naturalness (that is, approximately: lack of extreme fine-tuning) in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of inter-level relations are derived in …
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Leanne K Wilkins, QCD and Natural Philosophy, Arxiv.Org, physics.ed-ph (2002) 211-228.
QCD sheds considerable light on several of the most basic features of the natural world including the origin of mass, the feebleness of gravity, the extent to which the properties of matter can be determined conceptually, the possible utility of the anthropic principle, and the metatheoretic notions of effectiveness and computability. I discuss these applications here.
Published in: Annales Henri Poincare 4 (2003) S211-S228
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Porter Williams, Two Notions of Naturalness, Foundations Of Physics, 2006 (2018) 1-29.
My aim in this paper is twofold: (i) to distinguish two notions of naturalness employed in beyond the standard model (BSM) physics and (ii) to argue that recognizing this distinction has...
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U van Kolck, Naturalness in nuclear effective field theories, The European Physical Journal A, 56 (2020) 1-11.
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, which is usually obtained from a rule based on an assumption of naturalness. I discuss naturalness in the context of the relatively weak binding of nuclei, where discrete scale invariance plays a role in the emergence of complexity.
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