Between logos and mythos: Narratives of "naturalness" in today's particle physics community
Research output: Contributions to collected editions/works › Chapter › peer-review
Authors
At the core of today's particle physics stands the Standard Model, a theory whose predictions have so far not been contradicted by any experimental result. Despite this success in the last decades high-energy physicists have been speculating about and looking for a "new physics" beyond the Standard Model, and a motivation for this search is the "naturalness problem". This problem is neither an experimental anomaly nor a mathematical incoherence, but rather a non-compelling argument which physicists describe as "aesthetic" or "philosophical". In fact, the naturalness problem is best understood as a hybrid narrative combining words, formulas, numbers and analogies. This narrative is in some respects like a myth: it can be formulated in different, non-equivalent ways, which physicists however perceive as telling the same story of instability and disharmony, and it represents a shared belief helping define the high-energy-physics community.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Narrated Communities - Narrated Realities : Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice |
Editors | Hermann Blume, Christoph Leitgeb, Michael Rössner |
Number of pages | 15 |
Publisher | Brill Rodopi |
Publication date | 12.05.2015 |
Pages | 69-83 |
ISBN (print) | 9789004182929 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9789004184121 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 12.05.2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
- Media and communication studies