The Bootstrap Principle and the Uniqueness of the World

摘要

The bootstrap hypothesis emerged first as a possible explanation of certain experimental data in particle physics. This hypothesis was formulated for the first time in 1959 by Geoffrey Chew (1959; Chew & Jacob, 1964), a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was immediately used, for detailed physics calculations, by Chew and Mandelstam (1961). The word bootstrap itself is untranslatable. Indeed, bootstrap, in the proper sense laces, also means to levitate while dragging your boots. The most appropriate term in translation would be that of self-consistency.