Model building and dynamics

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This project is one of six individual projects that cooperate closely within the DFG Research Unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider”, established in 2016. The Research Unit regards the complexity of large-scale physical research as a challenge for the quest towards ever more encompassing and simpler descriptions of nature that has traditionally been associated with particle physics. It studies the theories, the epistemic practices, social conditions, and historical dynamics of contemporary elementary particle physics and its central experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in a consistently interdisciplinary fashion. Project B2 investigates the structure, role, and dynamics of models in today's elementary particle physics in light of recent philosophical debates that have emphasised the autonomous contributions of models to scientific explanations. It analyses the rich model landscape of physics beyond the standard model (BSM) and the diverse experimental and theoretical strategies to investigate it. Searches for BSM physics have become the centrepiece of today's particle physics and of the LHC. To date, however, none of the many features predicted in BSM models have been observed. This long series of negative evidence is beginning to have significant effects on how models are viewed by the particle physics community, leading to an increasing popularity of model-independent approaches and a shift of emphasis from model testing to experimental exploration. The project combines empirical methods with philosophical analyses of the models' conceptual structures, their conditions of application, and the motives of scientific actors adopting or abandoning them. It will deepen the philosophical understanding of models in general by a thorough analysis of their dynamics in a rapidly changing research field. In Phase 1, we identified as our main research directions the topics: model landscape, constraints on model building, model-theory relationship, and model dynamics. We have largely accomplished the intended milestones and intend, in Phase 2, to proceed along the lines of the initial proposal, but will focus more strongly on the limitations of the concept of model and physicists' moves towards model-independence.