A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws

Particle physicists, who study nature’s fundamental building blocks, are in crisis. The relationship between the Higgs boson and phenomena at the highest energy scales — those associated with the quantum nature of gravity, black holes and the Big Bang — just doesn’t feel right. The equations require extreme fine-tuning — of a type that physicists dub ‘unnatural’ — to work out in a way that reflects observations. Some physicists think this failure of ‘naturalness’ signals the breakdown of reductionism — that the laws of physics at big scales emerge from those at smaller scales.

Blogger Comments:

This misunderstands reductionism. Reductionism is the misinterpretation of a compositional hierarchy as reducing to its lowest level, as when physicists say nonsense like 'we are nothing but elementary particles'.