Stoeltzner Michael (University of South Carolina)
The aim of this poster is to present the works of the research unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider” that was granted in 2016 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) together with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for a six-year period. The group is composed of twelve principal investigators, six postdocs, and five doctoral students from the philosophy of science, history of science, and science studies.
The research unit investigates the philosophical, historical, and sociological implications of the activities at the world’s largest research machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Its general question is whether the quest for a simple and universal theory, which has motivated particle physicists for several decades, is still viable at a time when there are no clear indications for physics beyond the standard model and all experimental evidence is increasingly coming from a single large and complex international laboratory. Among the topics relevant to philosophers of science, and specifically philosophers of physics, are the nature of scientific evidence in a complex experimental and theoretical environment, the role of computer simulations in establishing scientific knowledge, the dynamics of the model landscape and its driving forces, the relationship between particle physics and gravitation (using the examples of dark matter searches and modified gravity), the significance of guiding principles and values for theory preference, the impressive career of and recent skepticism towards naturalness, along with its relationship to effective field theories, the natures of detectable particles and virtual particles, the role of large-scale experiments within model testing and explorative experimentation, and the understanding of novelty beyond model testing.
These interactions between the change in the conceptual foundations of particle physics prompted by LHC and the complex practices engaged there are studied in six independent, but multiply intertwined, research projects: A1 The formation and development of the concept of virtual particles; A2 Problems of hierarchy, fine-tuning and naturalness from a philosophical perspective; A3 The contextual relation between the LHC and gravity; B1 The impact of computer simulations on the epistemic status of LHC data; B2 model building and dynamics; B3: The conditions of producing novelty and securing credibility from the sociology of science perspective.
