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The naturalness questions seems outside the realm of importance for physics and over-hyped by this article (and perhaps by Arkani-Hamed). A much more sober app

The naturalness questions seems outside the realm of importance for physics and over-hyped by this article (and perhaps by Arkani-Hamed). A much more sober approach was put forth by David Gross in the article "And Gross, who considers naturalness a murky concept, simply wants a last-ditch search for new physics. “We need more hints from nature,” he said. “She’s got to tell us where to go.” This is the reality of particle physics right now: we have a theory that works for pretty much all the measurements we've made, but it's not particularly elegant. There are big questions certainly (like dark matter) but we have no particle physics data to really study there. Particle physicists like elegant theories (b/c they learned and loved Maxwells equations) and therefore aren't satisfied with correct physics.

pcmaffey 11y ago
Seems like the question of naturalness or "knowability" speaks more to the nature and limits of the human mind than of the universe itself. Definitely agree with Gross. It's why the loss of species, destruction of our environment, etc--replaced with mechanisms that are a reflection of ourselves--is all so disturbing. We are depriving ourselves of the potential to learn from the unique diverse world around us.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >Seems like the question of naturalness or "knowability" speaks more to the nature and limits of the human mind than of the universe itself. Certainly, the apparent fact that we can only know our own perceptions (images of observations) severely limits what we can know about the larger universe that may contain our perceptions. It would be foolish to believe that you know the ultimate reality; we already know that it is impossible to know since we can only ever access perceptions of the projections of "reality". Either all that exists is our perceptions, or we can never know the ultimate reality.

pcmaffey 11y ago

Seems like the question of naturalness or "knowability" speaks more to the nature and limits of the human mind than of the universe itself. Definitely agree with Gross. It's why the loss of species, destruction of our environment, etc--replaced with mechanisms that are a reflection of ourselves--is all so disturbing. We are depriving ourselves of the potential to learn from the unique diverse world around us.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
>Seems like the question of naturalness or "knowability" speaks more to the nature and limits of the human mind than of the universe itself. Certainly, the apparent fact that we can only know our own perceptions (images of observations) severely limits what we can know about the larger universe that may contain our perceptions. It would be foolish to believe that you know the ultimate reality; we already know that it is impossible to know since we can only ever access perceptions of the projections of "reality". Either all that exists is our perceptions, or we can never know the ultimate reality.