El próximo jueves, 17 de Febrero, tendremos a Pablo Ruiz de Olano (Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlín) en el Seminario Abierto de Filosofía. Su charla llevará por título "Physics in Crisis: Epistemic Decline in Physicists' Search for a Theory of Everything"; podéis encontrar un breve abstract más abajo (a pesar de que tanto el título como el abstract están en inglés, la charla será en castellano). Como de costumbre, nos reuniremos en el Salón de Juntas de la Facultad, a la una del mediodía. 

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Pablo Ruiz de Olano (Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)

Theoretical physics was one of the most successful scientific endeavors of the 20th century. During its first few decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized our conceptions of causality, space, and time. And after WWII, physicists succeeded in developing the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes the behavior of matter at its most fundamental level. Since the late 1970s, however, theoretical physics has made remarkably little progress, and the goal of providing a unified account of all fundamental interactions of nature has famously eluded physicists. Over time, this has led to an increasingly acute perception of crisis, which has become quite prominent in recent years. In this talk, I deploy the resources of the history and philosophy of science to analyze this phenomenon. My main claim will be that theoretical physics is currently undergoing a genuine crisis, which has definite epistemic roots. More precisely, I will point to two kinds of methodological oversights that, over time, have contributed to at least part of physics’ current troubles. The first one has to do with physicists’ diminishing zeal in clearly distinguishing between theories that are likely to be true and those that are merely worthy of further pursuit, while the second one is related to physicists’ failure to account for the increasingly important role that approximation methods have come to play in physical theorizing. I will support these claims with a number of case-studies from the history of high-energy physics, which include the work of Geoffrey Chew and Jun Jon Sakurai among others.