Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Radin Dardashti (11 December on Zoom)

On Friday, 11 December, Radin Dardashti (University of Wuppertal) will give a talk entitled “The rise and fall of scientific problems” (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl.

The program for the winter semester can be found here, while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel.

Abstract:

The everyday practice of scientists is to a large extent determined by the scientific problems they are confronted with. The conceptual analysis of scientific problems and how they change, therefore, may allow for a more fine-grained investigation of the development of a scientific discipline. In this talk I discuss what constitutes a scientific problem, what its elements are and how they change, following and building on the work of Thomas Nickles. I will illustrate the advantages of a more problem-focused approach in understanding the development of modern particle physics and shed some light on recent debates about the naturalness problem and whether it constitutes a “genuine” problem.