The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München is holding a workshop this week titled “Postwar Physics across Scales.” The event was organized by Alex Blum and Sébastien Rivat and is associated with a five-year project that Rivat is leading called RESCALE, which is funded by the European Research Council. Rivat kindly provided us with a brief introduction to the project:

The ERC-funded RESCALE project aims to examine the historical development and philosophical implications of physicists’ growing attempt to study physical systems “scale by scale” and “across scales” since the 1950s via new theories, models, methods, and mechanisms (e.g., effective theories, renormalization methods, low-energy and high-energy theorems, lattice models, scaling laws, and symmetry-breaking mechanisms).

The research team will focus on two particularly successful theoretical tools designed to this effect, effective field theories (EFTs) and renormalization group (RG) methods, and use them to engage with some key historical and philosophical questions: Why have postwar physicists come to devote so much of their focus to the structure of physical systems across scales? In what ways has their theoretical practice been impacted? Have the various approaches developed to engage with physical systems across scales been integrated into fully unified conceptual and methodological frameworks? What is the overall impact of this historical transformation on current philosophical debates over scientific representation, scientific realism, and reduction? What kind of partial world picture emerges out of this?

Beyond those questions, the project’s ambition is threefold: (i) to devote more attention to a still rather underexplored territory in the recent history of theoretical physics; (ii) to draw philosophers’ attention to the methodological and conceptual diversity of scale-based theoretical tools and multi-scale modeling techniques developed since the 1950s; (iii) to help clarify related interpretative issues that keep animating the physics community (e.g., the hierarchy problem) and foster communication across physics groups that hold different methodological outlooks (e.g., the use of EFTs in condensed matter and nuclear physics).

In the long run, this project will serve as a basis for unpacking the content, structure, and scope of what appears to be a major transformation in the recent history of theoretical physics, in continuity with Sam Schweber’s preliminary groundbreaking works. Additional information on the project is available at erc-rescale.com.

Speakers on the program

Abstracts of each talk are posted on the workshop website.

Alexander Blum, Beyond power counting: On the historical connection between renormalizability and gauge symmetry

Victoria Zwierzyk-Teles, The symmetries that were broken

Rocco Gaudenzi, Spontaneous symmetry breaking across scales: From physics to life and brain

Adam Koberinski, Particle physics across temperature scales

Sébastien Rivat, The evolution of Steven Weinberg’s conception of effective field theories in the 1970s

Robert van Leeuwen, The “problem of gauge hierarchies” in early unification physics

John Dougherty, The background of Batalin–Vilkovisky quantization

Francisco Caldéron, “Profound results from not-very-profound properties”: The renormalization-group route to asymptotic freedom

Vincenzo Nespeca, A brief history of asymptotic safety

Emilia Margoni, Cluster transfer: The renormalization group case

James Fraser, The many faces of the renormalization group

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William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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