Screams for Explanation: Finetuning and Naturalness in the Foundations of Physics

Abstract

We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology. Some other numerological coincidences are also discussed.

17 pages, no figures, typos fixed

References in corpus (4)

• Introduction to Effective Field Theory
• Cosmology and Convention
• Two Notions of Naturalness
• High-scale Supersymmetry, the Higgs Mass and Gauge Unification

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Rethinking Superdeterminism
• Two Notions of Naturalness
• A Toy Model for Local and Deterministic Wave-function Collapse
• The Practice of Naturalness: A Historical-Philosophical Perspective
• Contextuality, Fine-Tuning, and Teleological Explanation
• QFT without infinities and hierarchy problem
• Discovery potential for split supersymmetry with thermal dark matter
• Quantum field theories of relativistic Luttinger fermions
• Vacuum energy, the Casimir effect, and Newton's non-constant
• Unexpected Quantum Indeterminacy
• Leptophobic dark photon interpretation of the ${\eta }^{\left(\prime \right)}\to {\pi }^0\left(\eta \right)\gamma \gamma$ puzzle
• Precise interpretations of traditional fine-tuning measures
• Comment on "Experimentally adjudicating between different causal accounts of Bell-inequality violations via statistical model selection"
• Stagnant Lakatosian Research Programmes
• Deriving Ontological Statements from the Unnatural Higgs Mass