Particle physics foundation ontology
A particle physics foundation ontology (or particle ontology or particle physics zoo) is a system of interlocking claims that hold that atoms are made of physical particles, and that there is a finite number of these that exist, and which must be taken into account in any ontology that purports to describe a foundation for classical mechanics and for chemistry. Such beliefs motivate the continued investment in particle accelerator technology and research.
This foundation is assumed to be safe to assume as "the basic level of reality. Our ontology involves quarks, spacetime, and probability amplitudes." - Eleizer Yudkowsky
It is important because it provides the most basic description of reality to be used in foundational computer science and artificial intelligence.
versus waves, strings, and order
Some challenge the consistency of the various assumptions of particle physics. One well-known challenge, through string theory and various branches of quantum mechanics, attempt to unify explanations of phenomena observed in particle accelerator experiments in a theory based on waves, cognitive bonds between observer and observed (e.g. David Bohm's "implicate order"). This challenge generally follows scientific method and accepts claims of falsifiability of mathematical prediction.
It has, however, failed to produce a unified field theory.
as a consequence of human bias
A substantial strain of doubt about the reality of difficult-to-observe physical phenomena has persisted in modern physics. The first such tenous claim was advanced by Eugene Wigner in his 1960 paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in whose footnotes Wigner argued that "it is useful, in epistemological discussions, to abandon the idealization that the level of human intelligence has a singular position on an absolute scale. In some cases it may even be useful to consider the attainment which is possible at the level of the intelligence of some other species." This argument lay unexplored for forty years as cognitive psychology, anthropology, primatology and other sciences investigated "the level of the intelligence of some other species."
Significant ethical debate on the funding of sciences has sometimes flared, but there is no great call to preserve Great Ape species for their cognitive insight into physics, nor to cease funding particle physics in favor of a program of study of "ethno mathematics - the study of folk mathematics around the world." The debate is conducted in informal and, ultimately, political terms. Physicists' insight into spiritual or ecological matters is still generally seen as separate from their physics.
Were they broadly accepted, these arguments would alter the profession of physics but probably not its ultimate reliance on mathematical notations.
as a consequence of embodied minds
Others, more radically, claim that the avenue to proving that mathematics is a mere consequence of human or primate cognitive chemistry, and that "the embodied mind brings mathematics into being" - thereby creating human physics!
In their 2000 treatment of the cognitive science of mathematics, linguist George Lakoff and psychologist Rafael E. Núñez raises serious objections to assuming any such mathematical model to be "real" - suggesting that such particles may well be detected due to desire to detect them, or a shared observer bias amongst all their human observers, or reliance on a very few expensive particle acclerator apparatus, that justify their existence by providing outputs to physicists relying on it for status. Critics argue that no serious observer bias question has ever undone a major physical theory, and that arguments against the particle physics foundation ontology are ultimately only 'political'.
At present this line of reasoning seems confined to the body philosophers.
unclear future
As simulation methods, falsifiability, observer bias, and the objectivity of "big science" funded by governments and corporations comes into question, it seems likely that concerns with the particle physics zoo as a reliable foundation ontology for other sciences will continue. Understanding of human and primate cognitive chemistry and neuroscience, however, seems insufficient to advance any new foundation ontology based on those. For more information, see philosophy of mathematics.
Another possibility is that mathematics, sciences, and technologies will not be considered distinct in future and will not require a foundation ontology of any kind - relying strictly on one process of falsifiability. For more information, see philosophy of science.
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