Shifting Standards - by Allan Franklin (Hardcover)

About the Book

Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009.

Book Synopsis

In Shifting Standards, Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009.

Franklin develops a framework for his analysis, viewing each example according to exclusion and selection of data; possible experimenter bias; details of the experimental apparatus; size of the data set, apparatus, and number of authors; rates of data taking along with analysis and reduction; distinction between ideal and actual experiments; historical accounts of previous experiments; and personal comments and style.
From Millikan's tabletop oil-drop experiment to the Compact Muon Solenoid apparatus measuring approximately 4,000 cubic meters (not including accelerators) and employing over 2,000 authors, Franklin's study follows the decade-by-decade evolution of scale and standards in particle physics experimentation. As he shows, where once there were only one or two collaborators, now it literally takes a village. Similar changes are seen in data collection: in 1909 Millikan's data set took 175 oil drops, of which he used 23 to determine the value of e, the charge of the electron; in contrast, the 1988-1992 E791 experiment using the Collider Detector at Fermilab, investigating the hadroproduction of charm quarks, recorded 20 billion events. As we also see, data collection took a quantum leap in the 1950s with the use of computers. Events are now recorded at rates as of a few hundred per second, and analysis rates have progressed similarly.

Employing his epistemology of experimentation, Franklin deconstructs each example to view the arguments offered and the correctness of the results. Overall, he finds that despite the metamorphosis of the process, the role of experimentation has remained remarkably consistent through the years: to test theories and provide factual basis for scientific knowledge, to encourage new theories, and to reveal new phenomenon.

Review Quotes

A valuable contribution to the literature on the history and philosophy of science and specifically to the philosophy of scientific experimentation, the discipline of which Franklin is one of the outstanding scholars and founders. . . . A solid work on experiments in physics and experimental epistemic strategies, revealing transformations of epistemic norms in particle physics and portraying them as seen through a physicist's lens. . . . The book can be recommended not only to historians and philosophers of science but also to reflexive practicing scientists as a catalyst to help them examine themselves.-- "Philosophy of Science"

Philosophers of science should take cognizance of Franklin's analyses and their consequences, for here we have a faithful presentation of an important aspect of the scientific practice.-- "Giora Hon, University of Haifa, Israel"

Serves as a valuable, albeit specialized, guide to the history of statistics in high-energy physics. Franklin's study is timely . . . Any young researcher thinking of studying high-energy physics today would do well to delve into 'Shifting Standards.' When it comes to the business of identifying new particles and measuring their parameters, avoiding statistics would be a bad bet.-- "Physics Today"

About the Author

Allan Franklin is professor of physics at the University of Colorado. He is the author of numerous books, including Are There Really Neutrinos? An Evidential History; Selectivity and Discord: Two Problems of Experiment; and No Easy Answers: Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge. He is also coauthor of Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy.