Philosophical foundations of effective field theories

Abstract

This survey covers some of the main philosophical debates raised by the framework of effective field theories during the last decades. It is centered on three issues: whether effective field theories underpin a specific realist picture of the world, whether they support an antireductionist picture of physics, and whether they provide reasons to give up the ultimate aspiration of formulating a final and complete physical theory. Reviewing the past and current literature, we argue that effective field theories do not give convincing reasons to adopt a particular stance towards these speculative issues. They hold good prospects for asking ontologically perspicuous and sensible questions about currently accessible domains. With respect to more fundamental questions, however, the only certainty is provisional and instrumental: effective theories are currently indispensable for conducting fruitful scientific research.

Effective theories and infinite idealizations: a challenge for scientific realism

“…I will leave aside Wallace's account insofar as he is primarily concerned with defending the foundational and interpretative relevance of cut-off Lagrangian QFTs inWallace (2006Wallace ( , 2011 and not scientific realism strictly speaking (or, more precisely, structural realism).19 See alsoRuetsche (2018Ruetsche ( , 2020,Rosaler and Harlander (2019, Sect. 5.6), andRivat and Grinbaum (2020).…”

Nuclear Structure at the Crossroads

“…Steven Weinberg, more than anyone else, was the creator of EFT in its general form [1,2]. He sowed the seeds for diverse implementations of EFT [3,4], and he was the instigator of first chiral perturbation theory (χ PT) and later chiral EFT (χ EFT) for nucleon interactions. The advent of χ EFT transformed nuclear structure theory.…”

“…Steven Weinberg, more than anyone else, was the creator of EFT in its general form [1,2]. He sowed the seeds for diverse implementations of EFT [3,4], and he was the instigator of first chiral perturbation theory (χ PT) and later chiral EFT (χ EFT) for nucleon interactions. The advent of χ EFT transformed nuclear structure theory.The development of χ PT in the early 1980's [5,6] did not significantly impact the theoretical treatment of nuclei (that is, nuclear structure and reactions) for the next decade because there was no extension to more than one nucleon, for which perturbation theory is inadequate (e.g., there are bound states).…”

Misconceptions on Effective Field Theories and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: Response to Ellis’ Article

“…The survey by Hartmann [4] completely overlooks these facts and thus gives a very poor and inaccurate description of the efficacy of EFTs. For a survey with philosophical connections, the reader should consider [9]. Note also that EFTs are widely used in all field of physics, in atomic, cold atom, condensed matter, astrophysics, you name it.…”