SMuK 2023 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 3: Philosophy of Physics

AGPhil 3.1: Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 17:30–18:00, JAN/0027

Realism Going Local: Stabilizing Quarks — •Nurida Lena Boddenberg — University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

The aim of this talk is to present and defend a local realist position about stable phenomena and the traces leading towards them, called signatures, by acknowledging scientific practice and bottom-up data to phenomena inferences. For this endeavor, I will propose and justify a fourfold distinction into (raw) data, signatures, phenomena, and theories, utilizing a case study concerned with quarks.

I will show that jet events, or the scaling behavior of the structure functions in deep inelastic scattering, are signatures, and that their existence is independent of individual data sets and translatable across different experiments. Further, these signatures are also stabilized by their reliable reproducibility based on the different kinds of data. Nevertheless, they are not explicitly containing the entity, the quark, described in the theory of quantum chromodynamics. However, the (experimental) signatures can be traced back to a common origin, to a phenomenon. Referring to recent work on perspectival realism (Massimi 2022), I proceed to show that the more (experimental) signatures infer to one phenomenon, the more the latter is stabilized. Finally, I shall argue high-level theories or models can latch onto stabilized phenomena and provide further information, but the phenomena themselves can still exist independently.