The life cycle of scientific principles -- a template for characterizing physical principles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 'life cycle' template for analyzing how scientific principles develop through stages like prehistory, elevation, formalization, generalization, and challenge, aiding understanding and assessment.

Contribution

It proposes a systematic template for characterizing the development of scientific principles and demonstrates its application to foundational physics examples.

Findings

The template effectively describes the development stages of scientific principles.

It can diagnose the quality of scientific principles.

It has implications for their empirical testability.

Abstract

Scientific principles can undergo various developments. While philosophers of science have acknowledged that such changes occur, there is no systematic account of the development of scientific principles. Here we propose a template for analyzing the development of scientific principles called the 'life cycle' of principles. It includes a series of processes that principles can go through: prehistory, elevation, formalization, generalization, and challenge. The life cycle, we argue, is a useful heuristic for the analysis of the development of scientific principles. We illustrate this by discussing examples from foundational physics including Lorentz invariance, Mach's principle, the naturalness principle, and the perfect cosmological principle. We also explore two applications of the template. First, we propose that the template can be employed to diagnose the quality of scientific principles. Second, we discuss the ramifications of the life cycle's processes for the empirical testability of principles.