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 | 
|---|---|
| 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
 
