Model building and dynamics

该项目是2016年成立的DFG“大型强子对撞机认识论”研究小组密切合作的六个单独项目之一。研究单位认为，大规模物理研究的复杂性是对传统上与粒子物理学有关的更全面、更简单的自然描述的挑战。它以跨学科的方式研究理论、认知实践、社会条件和当代基本粒子物理学及其中心实验——大型强子对撞机（LHC）的历史动态。B2项目根据最近强调模型对科学解释的自主贡献的哲学辩论，调查了当今基本粒子物理学中模型的结构、作用和动力学。它分析了超越标准模型（BSM）的丰富的物理模型景观，以及研究它的各种实验和理论策略。寻找BSM物理已经成为当今粒子物理学和大型强子对撞机的核心。然而，迄今为止，在BSM模型中预测的许多特征都没有被观察到。这一长串的负面证据开始对粒子物理学界如何看待模型产生重大影响，导致与模型无关的方法日益流行，并将重点从模型测试转移到实验探索。该项目将经验方法与模型的概念结构、应用条件和科学行为者采用或放弃它们的动机的哲学分析相结合。它将通过在快速变化的研究领域中对模型动态的全面分析，加深对模型的哲学理解。在第一阶段，我们确定了我们的主要研究方向：模型景观、模型构建约束、模型-理论关系和模型动力学。我们已经在很大程度上完成了预期的里程碑，并打算在第二阶段沿着最初建议的路线进行，但将更强烈地关注模型概念的局限性和物理学家对模型独立的行动。

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.