Effective Theories in Physics by James D. Wells

Author:James D. Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783642348921
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

This attitude is partially in conflict with our understanding of Effective Theories today. The introduction of arbitrary constants is a key step in the construction of Effective Theories, and the role of experiment is to pin those down. If anything, the ad hoc inventors of changes in Newton’s law were too sheepish about introducing arbitrary parameters, and instead got tangled up with incoherent “deep reasons” for their particular laws.

Effective Theory is an intermediate step between an old regime (e.g., Newton’s laws) and a new regime (e.g., Einstein’s General Relativity), and this intermediate step necessarily has “arbitrary couplings” and does not “emanate from a principle that is superior to the existing doctrine”. Instead, it says that the existing doctrine should be taken to its utmost seriousness (e.g., Galilean invariance) and data should fit the parameters of all allowed interactions, and perhaps a deeper new theory can come along later to explain the relations among those parameters.

Although Gerber’s theory was not worthless, it is not as valuable as Einstein’s General Relativity. Alice and Bob’s effective theories would not have been worthless either had they written it down much earlier. They would have been an intermediate stepping stone from one principled theory to the next that would have predicted the existence of Mercury’s perihelion precession and motivated earlier discovery of the phenomena.

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