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Introduction The twentieth century both opened and closed with a bang: the belle époque before 1914 and the “roaring nineties” (Stiglitz, 2003) just past. It was only after the First World War that people looked back at the 1895–1914 period with nostalgia as a “beautiful era” of spreading prosperity, peaceful technical progress, low inflation, and modest financial instability. The 1990s, on the contrary, were seen as the “best of times” (Johnson, 2001) by many of those who lived through the decade – at least, those in the United States. Will future historians confirm this view? If the twentieth century is any guide, much will depend on how the twenty-first century unfolds. If peace again prevails, if productivity growth continues apace at the economic center and spreads to the periphery, if means are found to govern the international economy in ways that make the costs of globalization socially acceptable, then the 1990s may well be remembered as a moment in human history when the foundations were laid for a long period of sustainable growth. If, on the other hand, social, political, and economic instability prevails, as it did after the First World War, then people may indeed look back at the 1990s as “the best of times,” creating the myth of another belle époque. Posterity will magnify the virtues of the last decade in the twentieth century and ignore its shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three routes led from the Single European Act (SEA) to the Maastricht treaty. The functionalist approach went by Air. The theory holds that – once put into currency and institutionalized – the integration idea has reverberating, reciprocal, and dynamic spillovers that drive the process onward. This approach, the way of Monnet, Hallstein, and Delors, went through both the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Commission and would (if Delors had his druthers) debouch into a “European social and economic space.” Another approach, liberal intergovernmentalism, was by Land and passed milestones at the European Economic Community, the European Council, and the European Monetary System, each of them a Grand Bargain sealed by heads of state that advanced the integration process from one stage to the next. Finally, one might travel by SEA, promoting competition and eliminating barriers to the movement of goods and factors of production. The Common Market and the Single European Market marked this course, a hard one to chart, even though the route it followed – liberalization – was widely agreed to be the proudest achievement of the integration process prior to the great changes that swept Europe in the 1980s. The economics of integration are not well understood. The static models of neoclassical economics cannot account for change over time. Nor do the conditions they posit exist in a Europe of welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gravity is beautifully successful in describing the universe at macroscopic level but at microscopic level it is totally inadequate. By contrast, quantum theory is highly successful in describing matter on small scales. The detailed understanding of chemical reactions, lasers, microchips and nuclear weapons is based entirely on quantum physics. The concept of an atom originated in Greek antiquity, but it was suppressed under the baleful influence of Plato and Aristotle. In the early nineteenth century John Dalton resurrected ‘atomism’. Dalton was a Quaker and was born in 1766 in Eaglesfield, Cumberland, in England. He recognised that atoms could help to understand the data being accumulated by chemical and physical experiments. Dalton's atoms were the smallest indivisible unit of a substance and they retained their chemical properties. He maintained that chemical reactions were just the rearrangement of these basic units of matter. Dalton presented his work in a two-volume thesis called New System of Chemical Philosophy, published between 1808 and 1827. This laid the basis of modern chemistry. Dalton's atoms were not accepted enthusiastically by all chemists of the early nineteenth century. However, it was soon realised that the chemists and physicists of the day had independently accumulated data which suggested the atomic nature of matter. In particular, physicists such as Maxwell and Boltzmann maintained that the pressure exerted by gas in a container could be explained if the gas was assumed to be a collection of hard spheres, like billiard balls, which bounced off the walls of a container in accordance with Newtonian mechanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 200 years, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Newtonian mechanics reigned supreme. By the late nineteenth century, the few simple laws of Newtonian physics could explain, with uncanny accuracy, most of the disparate phenomena of the natural world. Everything in the heavens and on Earth appeared to obey the laws, and the mastery of these laws was bringing mankind the mastery of the environment. These laws dominated the way both scientists and laypersons thought. Newtonian mechanics has a deterministic framework for the cosmos and this was deeply satisfying to the Judeo-Christian culture of Western Europe. There were those who questioned Newton's assumptions of absolute space and time, independent of man, but anyone doubting the validity of the laws of motion or gravitation was not taken seriously by the scientific community. Newton had applied his theory of gravitation to two-body systems, such as the Sun and a planet. In the eighteenth century various attempts were made to extend it to three gravitating bodies. In 1682 Halley had claimed that the comet then observed in the sky had also appeared in 1531 and 1607; given, then, that the period of the comet was about 75 years, he predicted that it would reappear in 1758. Months before its appearance, the French mathematician Alexis Clairaut used tedious and brute-force mathematics to calculate the gravitational perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn on the otherwise elliptical orbit of Comet Halley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectacular progress in high-energy physics during the 1950s and the 1960s was due in large part to the availability of four large particle accelerators: the Cosmotron, the Bevatron, the AGS, and the CERN PS.* Although the history of the design, construction, and first operation of each of these machines is an adventurous saga in itself, relatively little attention has been devoted to it. Many of the machine builders who could detail these histories for posterity are no longer with us. Ernest Lawrence, Leland Haworth, Stanley Livingston, George Kenneth Green, Nicholas Christofilos, Hartland Snyder, John Adams, Frank Goward, and many others are gone, leaving very little beyond journal articles in the way of records of their eventful careers. For the most part, all were too busy with the future to spend much time recording the past. Livingston and I provided a sketchy history of the development of the accelerator art in our book Particle Accelerators. But very many of the colorful events in accelerator history remain unrecorded. In this chapter I attempt to provide a little background for accelerator history during the 1950s. At Brookhaven, we were in touch with all important accelerator projects and observed at first hand many of the unsung tribulations that beset accelerator builders, as well as the uplifting moments when their machines performed as they should. Autobiographical note My career covers the first thirty-two years of Brookhaven's existence. I joined the staff in the summer of 1947, Brookhaven's first year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The first Rochester conference on high-energy nuclear physics was held 16 December 1950, twenty months after the last of the three Shelter Island conferences on the foundations of quantum mechanics, organized by Robert Oppenheimer (1947–9). Five high-energy accelerators (“high energy” was defined as > 100 MeV thirty-five years ago!) had been completed since the end of World War II and were producing research results: two at Berkeley (340–MeV synchrocyclotron and 300-MeV electron-synchrotron), the Rochester 240-MeV and Harvard 150-MeV synchrocyclotrons, and the Cornell 300-MeV electron-synchrotron. Many more accelerators with even higher energies were under construction. Cosmic-ray experimentalists throughout the world were making extremely important contributions to the field. It seemed clear to me that the Shelter Island conferences – which had been limited to a small number of theorists, with a couple of “token” experimentalists – should be replaced by a new series of conferences that would give equal weight to the participation of accelerator experimentalists, cosmicray experimentalists, and theorists. As the newly installed chairman of the Rochester Physics Department – with one of the few meson-producing machines in operation and a very active cosmic-ray group – I decided to organize an invitational conference that would thoroughly discuss the latest developments in high-energy physics. The first two Rochester conferences were small (fifty to seventy-five participants), were of short duration (two days), were supported by local industry, and still were not truly international (Europe and Japan were recovering from the war). Their success and the increasing worldwide interest in the field led to the raising of sights in all respects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this essay is taken from Robert Oppenheimer. He had three types of excellence in mind: first, for the theoretician, the excellence of new ideas while he attempts to read Allah's design; for the experimenter, the excellence of new discoveries, the sheer pleasure of the search of carrying an experimental technique to its limits and beyond; and, finally, of the desire to spite the theorist. Oppenheimer had these forms of excellence in mind, but also much more: He emphasized the opportunity physics affords to come to know internationally a class of great human beings whom one respects not only for their intellectual eminence but also for their personal human qualities – a reflection of their greatness in physics. In addition, he had in mind the opportunities that physics uniquely affords for involvement with humankind – in the parlance of today, in engaging in problems of development and of enhancing the human ideal. I wish to speak here on some aspects of Oppenheimer's thoughts from a personal point of view. I shall illustrate these by recalling my induction into research on the renormalization of meson theories and the excellent men I was privileged to meet while pursuing this research. I also wish to speak on excellence through world development. In particular, I want to speak about the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, whose creation, under the auspices of the United Nations, I was privileged to suggest in September 1960. The Centre came into being only in October 1964 – beyond the cutoff date of this symposium's coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although some of you already know about the CERN history project, please allow me a few words of description. Like the object of our study, the history team is supranational: John Krige from the United Kingdom, Ulrike Mersits from Austria, Dominique Pestre from France, and myself from Germany. The funding comes from science foundations in several European countries. CERN is not financing the project, but provides offices and other help. Our results are being issued in a series of reports called Studies in CERN History, to stimulate criticism and discussion before the final manuscript is produced. The prehistory, up to the official foundation of CERN on 29 September 1954, is nearly finished and will be published as the first of two volumes.* One part is an analysis of the emergence of the idea to create a European laboratory from scientific needs and the desire for European unity. The two principal champions who struggled for the laboratory were Pierre Auger and Edoardo Amaldi. Amaldi's account at this symposium is included here as Chapter 35. The present chapter is based on an analysis of the decision-making process in four of the participating countries – the studies by Krige for the United Kingdom, Pestre for France, Lanfranco Belloni for Italy, and Hermann for Germany. The work is based (as are all the studies of the team) on source material in many governmental and private archives, as well as in the CERN archives, and will form part of the first volume of CERN's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The history of CERN is of considerable interest, not only for highenergy physics but also more generally, because CERN is the first example of an intergovernmental research laboratory created in Europe that has been operated successfully for more than thirty years – a remarkable model for the creation of international organizations. Armin Hermann, with the help of a few younger historians, is preparing a complete history of CERN in two volumes.* From this extensive presentation, John Krige of Hermann's group, with the help of his colleagues, will extract a more concise CERN history, contained in a single volume of 300 pages and addressed to a wider public. My account here is of a completely different nature. I did not consult the archives of the foreign ministries or of the research councils of the member states of CERN or of other intergovernmental organizations. The material here is based on a few well-known documents, on my personal diary of that period, and on a few reports and lectures prepared years ago by Lew Kowarski or by me. Everyone agrees that the early history of CERN can be divided into three periods. The first period encompassed the first initiatives and extended from the middle of the 1940s to 15 February 1952. On that date, the representatives of eleven European governments signed in Geneva the agreement established ing a provisional organization with the aim of planning an international laboratory and organizing other forms of cooperation in nuclear research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six billion dollars will buy two nuclear powered aircraft carriers, 19 months of research on the Star Wars antimissile system – or the ultimate dream machine for the 2,000 or so high-energy physicists in the United States. It is a particle accelerator – an “atom smasher” in the old vernacular – and if funded would be the biggest machine ever built … Physicists say the machine would help them fathom such basics as the nature of matter and the origin of the universe. But the government may well balk at spending such a sum for a device that produces mere scientific findings. This statement, from Newsweek (22 April 1985), epitomizes the political economy of postwar high-energy physics. Its practitioners have had to allege that more than “mere scientific findings” will result from the construction of their atom smashers – the ultimate dream machine has changed with time – in order to satisfy their federal patrons. The increasingly energetic and costly machines built since the war have testified to the physicists' success in linking their own with the national purpose. There has been, inevitably, a trade-off between scholarly and state purposes that can be understood by an historical analysis of the political economy of high-energy physics in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the modern patterns of patronage of particle physics first manifested themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Never in my fondest dreams did I expect in January 1957 to be invited, twenty-eight years later, to reminisce about decisive experiments on symmetry violation in a great national laboratory directed by Leon M. Lederman. Such reminiscences not only are unnecessary (some of the key protagonists having already published their recollections in Maglich's nowdefunct journal) but also can be misleading. Nobody has total recall, and personal souvenirs can get warped by things heard but not experienced. Just recall Einstein's contradictory answers to the question whether he was or was not aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1905. Theoretical prologue My friend Laurie Brown has asked me to include in my talk some remarks about the history of the theoretical developments in the field of weak interactions, as several of the main contributors to this field are present here but have chosen not to talk. I shall oblige Laurie Brown in some sense, but still avoid giving a chronological presentation devoid of personal reminiscences. Such presentations are available in standard textbooks. Let me not praise famous men: It might be embarrassing (or insufficient) to them and to me. Let me instead mention a few early contributions that, for one reason or another, have rarely been cited in past reviews. Before the famous Lee–Yang paper on parity nonconservation, theorists generally stated that there existed five different four-fermion couplings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efforts that came to fruition with the detection of the free neutrino started at Los Alamos in 1950–1, when several of us who were engaged in the testing of nuclear bombs wondered if that man-made star could be used to advance our knowledge of physics. For one thing, the unusual object featured lots of fissions, followed by β decays; so why not use it as a source of neutrinos? After all, it is an extraordinarily intense pulse, and signals produced by such a source might be sufficiently copious and distinguishable from background. Some hand-waving and rough estimates led me to conclude that the bomb was, in fact, the best source. All that was required was a massive detector, measuring a cubic meter or so. As it happened, Enrico Fermi was at Los Alamos during the summer of 1951, and I took the opportunity to talk with him about these matters. The conversation went something as follows: “I would like to talk with you a few minutes about the possibility of neutrino detection.” He was very pleasant, and said, “Well, tell me what is on your mind.” “First off as to the source,” I said, “I think that the bomb is best.” After a few moments thought he replied, “Yes, the bomb is the best source.” So far so good. And then I said, “But one needs a detector which is so big and I don't know how to make such a detector.” He thought about it further and said he didn't know either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jones: The discussions are organized as follows: first some remarks on the subject of particle accelerators in the 1950s, then some remarks on particle detectors. Although people like Luis Alvarez bridge both fields, generally the two fields are more or less discrete. Robert R. Wilson deals with aspects of particle accelerators from the Cornell perspective; in a separate chapter in this volume, Donald Kerst summarizes the MURA developments in the 1950s;* Robert Hofstadter discusses detectors, in particular the development of solid inorganic scintillators. Ugo Amaldi and Alvarez then take up other aspects of particle detectors. The panel concludes with a general discussion, including responses to questions from the floor. It may be useful at this point to summarize the accelerator and detector technologies that were available at the beginning of the 1950s, and then briefly catalog the conceptual advances and inventions during that decade. Electron acceleration techniques evolved rapidly during the 1940s, beginning with the invention of the betatron by Kerst and, following the war, the development of the electron-synchrotron by Edwin McMillan. Meanwhile, William Hansen and others invented and developed the electron linear accelerator, substantially in the form it has retained to the present. The proton accelerators before 1950 were at first high-voltage machines, developed by John Cockcroft and Ernest T. S. Walton, then electrostatic generators developed by Robert J. Van de Graaff and Raymond G. Herb, followed by Ernest O. Lawrence's cyclotron. Postwar developments included the synchrocyclotron of McMillan and Vladimir Veksler and the Alvarez proton linear accelerator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The possibilities of a great increase in the energy of particles opened up by the invention of alternating-gradient focusing aroused great interest in the Midwest. One result was the establishment of the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA) to build a large accelerator for the midwestern region. It was a time when there was much to be learned about accelerator design. To achieve the best results from machines, which were becoming conspicuously expensive, it was important to understand orbit behavior fully. The application of the digital computer after 1952, particularly at Brookhaven and at the University of Illinois, revealed the necessary details of manipulations of synchrotron and betatron phase space in the presence of realistic nonlinearities and perturbations. At the dedication of the Brookhaven Cosmotron (on 15 December 1952), Samuel K. Allison of the University of Chicago and P. Gerald Kruger of the University of Illinois suggested that a meeting of the scientists in the midwestern region of the United States should be called to consider ways of providing a high-energy facility for that part of the country. The meeting, held on 17 and 18 April 1953, at the University of Chicago, was attended by a large number of midwestern scientists interested in high-energy research. The group invited Ernest Courant, John Blewett, and Robert R. Wilson, who were already working with the design problems of alternating-gradient accelerators, to give talks. Courant explained the problems of misalignment and the choice of optimum parameters for an alternating-gradient synchrotron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instruments and history When we think about the history of physics, we usually think about theories – the magisterial sweep of relativity, quantum mechanics, current algebra, SU(3), and gauge theories seems to subsume and dwarf the details of experiments. And if experiments appear small, how much less significant are instruments? The great breaks and continuities of physics are typically defined by the epochal accomplishments of Maxwell's equations, Einstein's special relativity, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, and quantum electrodynamics. Such a “theorocentric” view has become ingrained in our pedagogical, physical, and historical literature. Most textbooks attach only a passing section on the devices of experimentation. The subfields of physics are classified by the theories they lead to – not by all the results one can get from instruments. But it is hopelessly one-sided to let theory stand in for all of physics when we want to understand the past sympathetically, to capture the felt continuities of physicists in the day-to-day practice of their discipline. Experimentalists frequently move between theoretical areas linked only by a continuity in the experimental skills and instruments they have at hand. Here I want to examine some of the “instrumental” continuities – and discontinuities – that existed in the 1950s, for that decade saw a proliferation of instruments unparalleled in the twentieth century. Necessarily, only a few can be discussed here, as it is hardly possible to cover the multitude of detectors that arose in that decisive decade. Regrettably, I shall not discuss developments in nuclear emulsions or scintillators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Peter Galison's chapter in this volume correctly summarizes the history of the development of the flash-tube hodoscope and the spark chamber. However, books and survey articles that describe the development of the flash-tube hodoscope and also the spark chamber refer to the historically incorrect review by Arthur Roberts presented at the spark-chamber symposium held 7 February 1961 at the Argonne National Laboratory. Because, for some reason, the article I wrote in 1959 with Sigenori Miyamoto was completely ignored by the researchers of cosmic-ray and particle physics outside of Japan, I would like to present here the precise history of that phase of the development of the discharge (spark) chamber. In our work, Miyamoto and I recognized that the localization of discharges in the flash tubes depended on the values of E/p and on the time duration of applied high-voltage pulses, and we raised the possibility of a new triggerable track detector, using gaseous discharges illustrated with photographs that would show the discharge columns along the cosmic-ray trajectory. I should emphasize that this observation was the starting point of the discharge (spark) chamber and the transition from flash tubes. Copies of the article were mailed to the relevant institutes and laboratories outside of Japan from the Institute for Nuclear Study (INS), University of Tokyo. The 1957 report was cited in the reference list of our article on the discharge chamber. Introduction of flash-tube apparatus in extensive air-shower experiments at INS The INS, at the University of Tokyo, was founded in 1955 as the interuniversity research center for nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1946, before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) could be formed, the Manhattan Engineering District established Brookhaven National Laboratory, a laboratory devoted exclusively to peacetime research. The mission was to make available in the Northeast certain facilities that were too large to be supported by any single university. Specifically, these facilities were a nuclear reactor for research with neutrons, a 700-MeV synchrocyclotron, and a particle accelerator to reach or surpass the then-unheard-of energy of a billion electron volts (proton-synchrotron). The reactor was, I think, the first built purely for scientific research purposes; it was decommissioned some years ago and replaced by a more modern reactor, which is still operating. The building of the cyclotron was given up after a year or so of design work; instead, the Nevis synchrocyclotron (somewhat smaller) was built by Columbia University. As for the proton-synchrotron: Edwin McMillan and Vladimir I. Veksler had independently discovered the principle of phase stability, which was first applied to the synchrocyclotron and the electron-ring synchrotron. But for really high energy, the synchrocyclotron would become too massive to be attractive, since it requires the entire interior of the top energy orbit to be filled with magnetic field. The electron-synchrotron requires magnetic field only at the other radius and thus is more economical, but the phenomenon now known as synchrotron radiation made for very large power requirements at high energy. These requirements seemed to limit the energy to some 300 MeV (a rather elastic limit, which has since increased considerably, but really only by applying massive radio-frequency power). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Go west …” As the decade of the 1950s began, there was still no accelerator with an energy as high as 1 GeV. Still, the stage was set for an almost explosive development. The new principle of phase-stable acceleration, proposed by Vladimir Veksler and Edwin McMillan in 1945, had already been put to use in a large proton-synchrocyclotron at Berkeley (600 MeV) and in a rash of electron-synchrotrons with energies near 300 MeV. Indeed, by 1950, the first two large proton-synchrotrons were under construction: the 3-GeV Cosmotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the 6-GeV Bevatron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. These developments were, however, of little personal concern to me. I was, at the time, a young faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on cosmic-ray research in the laboratory of Bruno Rossi. However, early in 1950, I began to give a little thought to the possibility of switching at least part of my research to particle physics, using the recently completed MIT electron-synchrotron. Such thoughts were brusquely terminated in April of that year, when I was forced, on one day's notice, to abandon my position at MIT and flee the state of Massachusetts to avoid legal prosecution by an irate former wife. A day later I found myself in New York City without money or job, and with quite an uncertain future. Fortunately, during World War II, I had become something of an expert in the design of electronic instruments (under the tutelage of Joseph Kiethley at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and of William Higinbotham at the Los Alamos Laboratory), and that knowledge now came to my rescue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The photographic method The use of photographic plates to record ionizing radiations dates back to Henri Becquerel, who in 1896 discovered radioactivity from the blackening of plates by uranium salts. In 1910–11, M. Kinoshita showed that it was possible to record individual tracks due to a particles at both verticle and tangential angles to the emulsion plane. During the 1920s and 1930s, experiments by M. Blau and H. Wambacher in Germany, G. Zhdanov in the USSR, H. J. Taylor in England, and R. Wilkins and H. Rumbaugh and A. Locher in the United States recorded particles both from cosmic rays and from accelerators, on occasion achieving sensitivity to protons by use of organic sensitizing dyes (e.g., pinakryptol yellow). The general nonreproducibility of the results, however, placed the technique under something of a cloud. Indeed, in 1935, Taylor, at Cambridge, using Ilford Rl and R2 emulsions, concluded that it was “impossible to deduce with any accuracy the energy of individual particles from range in emulsion.” Similar remarks were voiced by M. Stanley Livingston and Hans Bethe in 1937. This situation was transformed for two reasons. First, Cecil F. Powell and F. Fertel in 1943 showed that the energy resolution in the study of (d, p) reactions in boron, using the proton range in emulsion, was at least as good as that obtained with counters and absorbers (Figure 5.1); the method could be made quantitative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction This chapter is a personal account of the most significant contributions by cosmic-ray physicists to the discovery and study of the strange particles in the ten years that followed the discovery in 1947 of the V particles in conventional cloud chambers. [V particle is a generic term invented by Patrick M. S. Blackett and Carl D. Anderson, and generally adopted in the early days, to describe the strange particles whose decay resulted in characteristic V-shaped tracks (see Figures 4.4, 4.9, and 4.10).] For fuller accounts of the subject, one should see the many excellent reviews in Progress in Cosmic Ray Physics, Progress in Physics, supplements to Il Nuovo Cimento, and Reviews of Modern Physics, and in numerous papers in the proceedings of cosmic-ray and particle physics conferences. Two long historical reviews by Charles Peyrou and myself give the main references. Significant factors in the discovery of the strange particles in cloud chambers Two special factors contributed to the success achieved with cloud chambers in the discovery and investigation of strange particles and, in certain areas, made their contribution unique, namely, penetrating-shower selection and counter control. Penetrating-shower selection Historically, the V particle work grew out of the detailed study of the so-called penetrating showers (ps) by Lajos Jánossy and his associates before and during the war. To Jánossy, such a shower meant a shower of penetrating particles (i.e., muons), but we now know that it was simply a high-energy interaction consisting mainly of nucleons, pions, muons, electrons, and photons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symposium on which this volume is based was the fourth large meeting sponsored by physicists and devoted to the history of nuclear or particle physics. Many of the historians who attended earlier meetings came away with the impression that their hosts considered them to be passive receptacles for the true stuff of history (namely, reminiscences and recollections) or active clerks, able to look up bibliography, spell, and get dates right. This was a violation of parity between physicists and historians in the study of the past, and it resulted, of course, in weak interactions. I shall take the opportunity provided by the democratic action of this symposium's organizers to say a few words about the methods and objectives of historians. I shall then mention a few aspects of the history of particle physics particularly interesting to historians. Although physics and history aim at different things, there are important parallels between them. Classical physics may have its analogue in dynastic history, the concern with rulers, courts, diplomacy, and wars characteristic of the historians of the nineteenth century, a concern that eventually made some people as impatient, and showed itself as limited, as the physics of mass points. While physicists extended their work to the domains of relativity and the quantum, historians brought social, economic, and institutional forces to center stage. Historians of physics underwent this revolution – which took them from exclusive concern with great men and battles of ideas to consideration of the milieu as well as the content of science – about twenty-five years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1947 and 1963, a period freely referred to here as “the fifties,” elementary particle physics was growing up and undergoing the triumphs and pains of its adolescence. Beginning with the discovery of charged pions in cosmic rays, the period ended with the proposition that the basic constituents of the hadrons are quarks. The period witnessed the vindication of quantum field theory in renormalized quantum electrodynamics (QED), only to see it rejected as a theory of the strong and weak interactions. It saw the concept of symmetry emerge as a fundamental characteristic of basic physics, followed by its downfall in the parity revolution. Researchers discovered particles that were so different from any known previously that they labeled them “strange,” and they found unexpected properties in familiar interactions. The fifties was a time of intellectual turmoil, of shifting attitudes and changing theoretical fashions. For particle physics, as for science in general, the period was a time of transition, as energy was redirected from the problems of war to the concerns of peace. Profiting from their participation in the radar and atomic bomb projects (we are speaking now mainly of the United States, but that is where the shift began), physicists planned and carried out cooperative scientific research on a scale previously unknown in peacetime and drew on the prestige that derived from their wartime successes to obtain the necessary funding. Elementary particle physics, then called, significantly, “high-energy nuclear physics,” served as a prototype for other large-scale scientific projects, such as the space programs in the United States and the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science policy is rarely considered part of the core of the science system, but is seen as peripheral, providing a framework for establishing priorities and allocating research funds, setting up institutional structures within which research programs can proceed with a continuous, predictable level of funding, and providing incentives for the wider transfer of knowledge and for the utilization of research results – usually for the benefit of the national economy. The various models of science policy are closely related to the profiles of national institutions and to the specific instruments of policy-making available to obtain their objectives. Many observers agree that science policy in the highly industrialized countries has moved through distinct phases or “eras” since the end of World War II. These phases differ in the underlying patterns of scientific and technological change, in the issues on research agendas, in the preferred instruments for decision-making, in the modes of funding, and in the modes of research. It is also said that, in the use and regulation of science as a source of strategic opportunities, science policy is undergoing a process of internationalization, in that international cooperation is being promoted (Ruivo, 1994). Other science policy analysts diagnose an increasing “denationalization of science”, evidenced by growth of trans-national research cooperation, even in less cost-intensive areas, the shift from public to private funding, and the regionalization of research (Crawford et al.91992). But international cooperation on one level does not necessarily preclude competition on another. The globalization of the economy, the wider geographical distribution of the sources of scientific and technological knowledge, and growing interdependenciesmake it clear that the configurations of cooperation and competition are not fixed, but fluid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers agree that science is currently passing through a period of dramatic transformation. At the end of his lucid analysis of science in a dynamic steady state, John Ziman concludes that there is no way back to the traditional habits of managing research, but there is also no obvious path forward to a cultural plateau of comparable stability. The new structures that are emerging are not the products of a gentle process of evolution: they are being shaped very roughly by a dynamic balance between external forces exerted by society at large and internal pressures intrinsic to science itself We believe that the emergence of HTS sheds light on what these forces are and how they interact. In the beginning of this book, we compared the effects of the discovery of HTS on the research system to a building tested by being subjected to a transient load which reveals otherwise hidden strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, HTS can be seen as a case that shows how complex and fluid the present situation has become. Researchers can no longer expect to find an environment hospitable to their work, but are compelled to create one. We have seen that it takes extraordinary effort, time, and energy to set up the conditions under which research programs can run for a predictable period. Such efforts are no longer external to, but have become an integral feature of scientists' work. Nor are they limited to the small research group institutionally at home at the university. The situation is also extremely fluid on the level of policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of the Standard Model marked the attainment of another stage in the attempt to give a unified description of the forces of nature. The program was initiated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Oersted and Faraday, the “natural philosophers,” who, influenced by Naturphilosophie, gave credibility to the quest and provided the first experimental indication that the program had validity. Thereafter, Maxwell constructed a model for a unified theory of electricity and magnetism, providing a mathematical formulation that was able to explain much of the observed phenomena and to make predictions of new ones. With Einstein the vision became all-encompassing. In addition, Einstein advocated a radical form of theory reductionism. For him the supreme test of the physicist was “to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.” A commitment to reductionism and a desire for unification animated the quest for the understanding of the subnuclear domain – and success in obtaining an effective representation was achieved by those committed to that vision. The formulation of the Standard Model is one of the great achievements of the human intellect – one that rivals the genesis of quantum mechanics. It will be remembered – together with general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the unravelling of the genetic code – as one of the outstanding intellectual advances of the twentieth century. But much more so than general relativity and quantum mechanics, it is the product of a communal effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quarks were proposed in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig to explain the multiplet structure of the observed hadrons. Their experimental observation occurred a few years later, through inelastic electron–nucleon scattering at SLAC by Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, Richard Taylor, and their collaborators. Quarks have had many successes. For example, since the discovery of the upsilon in 1977 by Leon Lederman and his collaborators, there are five known quarks: u, d, c, s, and b.3 Thus, for e+e− energies above the bb̄ threshold but much below the rest mass of the Z boson, the production of all quark pairs is expected to be given by the Feynman diagram of Fig. 34.1 (a), leading to the result where the overall common factor 3 is due to the number of colors for each of the five quarks. This is in good agreement with experimental results on total hadronic production cross sections. In spite of these successes, the produced quark pairs of fractional charge have never been observed directly. This dilemma leads to the working hypothesis, due mainly to James Bjorken and Richard Feynman, that somehow the quarks turn into a group of hadrons through strong interactions. Another way of stating this hypothesis is that quarks are “confined,” so that in the final state the quarks must combine with other quarks or antiquarks to form hadrons. Independent of the mechanism for turning quarks into hadrons, the hadrons are expected to retain some memory of the quark momentum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several accounts have been written of the discovery of neutral weak currents, mainly by social scientists or theoreticians. Although doubtless well motivated, these authors were themselves not immersed in the experimental situation in neutrino physics in the 1960s and 1970s. There have also been, of course, nonhistorical reviews of the physics of neutral currents. In this chapter I shall present an experimenter's account of the sequence of events in this discovery, based on my own experience and on discussions with other physicists taking part in those experiments. As emphasized earlier in this volume by Leon Lederman (see Chapter 6), discoveries in high-energy physics are frequently stories of false trails, crossed wires, sloppy technique, misconceptions, and misunderstandings, compensated by the occasional incredible strokes of good luck. Certainly this was the case for neutral currents. It is well known that neutral currents were discovered in 1973 by a collaboration operating with the bubble chamber Gargamelle at the CERN Proton Synchrotron. Gargamelle (shown in Fig. 25.1) was a large (4.8 m long, 1.9 m diameter) heavy-liquid chamber filled with freon (CF3Br) with 20 tons total mass. For the neutral-current investigation, a relatively small fiducial volume of 3 m3 (4.5 metric tons) was employed. The chamber was conceived and constructed by André Lagarrigue with the help of engineers from Saclay, and funded largely by the French atomic energy commission. Other physicists participating included André Rousset and Paul Musset, who were prominent in the subsequent physics program at CERN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1961 Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman independently introduced a classification scheme, based on SU(3) symmetry, that placed hadrons into families on the basis of spin and parity. Like the periodic table for the elements, this scheme had predictive as well as descriptive powers. Hadrons that were predicted within this framework, such as the Ω−, were later discovered. In 1964 Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed quarks as the building blocks of hadrons as a way of generating the SU(3) classification scheme. When the quark model was first proposed, it postulated three types of quarks - up (u), down (d), and strange (s), having charges ⅔, – ⅓, and – ⅓, respectively; each of these was hypothesized to be a spin-½ particle. In this model the nucleon (and all other baryons) is made up of three quarks, and all mesons each consist of a quark and an antiquark. For example, as the proton and neutron both have zero strangeness, they are (u,u,d) and (d,d,u) systems, respectively. Though the quark model provided the best available tool for understanding the properties of the hadrons that had been discovered at the time, the model was thought by many to be merely a mathematical representation of some deeper dynamics, but one of heuristic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiment that led to the discovery of the muon neutrino was the largest experiment that had ever been mounted at Brookhaven at its time. The experimental team consisted of only seven people – three professors, three graduate students, and one physicist from the AGS (Alternating Gradient Synchrotron) department. We fashioned the biggest detector that had ever been built at that time, consisting mainly of ten tons of aluminum. It was an experiment in which we ended up having a lot of fun and made some important progress. This chapter will discuss this experiment, the first high-energy neutrino experiment, and mention a few developments that have occurred in neutrino scattering since that time. What was the state of particle theory in 1959, when planning for this experiment began? In general, theory was in a fairly primitive state: V–A and parity violation were well understood, and there was a general universality among weak interactions involving muons, electrons, nucleons, and neutrinos. And everything was relatively consistent with a simple four-fermion point vertex: the Fermi theory. There had been one prior neutrino experiment, done by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines – the classic experiment, one of the most beautiful experiments of the 1950s – in which antineutrinos produced in a nuclear reactor gave rise to a reaction in which an antineutrino and a proton yielded a neutron and a positron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a remarkable similarity among the modern collider detectors operating at many diverse facilities. For example, the experiments running for the past several years at LEP, the SLD detector just beginning to operate at the SLAC Linear Collider, the detectors now coming into operation at HERA, and those planned for the SSC and CERN's Large Hadron Collider all look quite similar to one another even though the colliders on which they function are quite different. I believe that there are simple and understandable reasons for this similarity. The present situation contrasts markedly with that of the detectors employed in the first collider experiments during late 1960s and early 1970s – essentially the same period we are studying at this Symposium. In the early colliding-beam experiments, many different detector architectures were tried; out of all those ideas came a “standard model” of detectors, the cylindrically symmetric, solenoid-magnet detector that so dominates colliding-beam experiments today. For example, the first detectors at the early storage rings – CBX at Stanford, ACO at Orsay, the VEPP machines at Novosibirsk – were visual detectors, involving spark chambers and other techniques; they were designed to study specific final states over limited ranges of solid angle, with little or no particle identification, limited trigger capability, and no momentum analysis. They were not, as one would say today, general-purpose detectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My own career in science has been intimately tied up in the transition from the old fixed-target technique to colliding-beam work. I have led a kind of double life as both a machine builder and as an experimenter, taking part in building and using the first of the colliding-beam machines, the Princeton–Stanford Electron–Electron Collider, and building the most recent advance in the technology, the Stanford Linear Collider. The beginning was in 1958 and, in the more than three decades since, there has been a succession of both electron and proton colliders that have increased the available center-of-mass energy for hard collisions by more than a factor of 1000. The history of that advance for both electron and proton colliders (constituent center-of-mass energy is plotted versus time of the first physics experiment) is shown in Fig. 15.1. The important number for the experimenter, the constituent center-of-mass energy, has increased by about a factor of 10 every 12 years for both kinds of systems. On the electron line, one can see a kind of complete cycle in accelerator technology from the birth of the colliding-beam storage ring, to its culmination in LEP II, and the beginning of the next technique for high-energy electron collisions, the linear collider. On the proton line, one has gone from the first bold initiative, the ISR at CERN, which used conventional magnets, to the superconducting magnets that are used in all proton colliders built today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1970s elementary particle physicists began speaking of the “Standard Model” as the basic theory of matter. This theory is based on sets of fundamental spin-½ particles called “quarks” and “leptons,” which interact by exchanging generalized quanta, particles of spin 1. The model is referred to as “standard,” because it provides a theory of fundamental constituents – an ontological basis for describing the structure and behavior of all forms of matter (gravitation excepted), including atoms, nuclei, strange particles, and so on. In situations where appropriate mathematical techniques are available, it can be used to make quantitative predictions that are completely in accord with experiment. There are no well-established results in particle physics that clearly disagree with this theory. This pleasing state of affairs is quite new in particle physics. It contrasts markedly with the theoretical situation in the early 1960s, when there were a variety of different ideas about the subatomic realm. For example, in 1964 most particle physicists considered protons, neutrons, pions, kaons, and a host of other strongly interacting particles (i.e., hadrons) to be in a certain sense “elementary.” By 1979 the consensus had emerged that the hadrons were not elementary after all but are composed of more basic building blocks called quarks, held together by the exchange of another kind of particle called the gluon. Or consider the particle interactions. In 1964 almost all physicists thought the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions were independent phenomena, perhaps requiring different types of theories for their description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Standard Model is surely one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, decades of path-breaking experiments culminated in the emergence of a comprehensive theory of particle physics. This theory identifies the basic fundamental constituents of matter and describes all the forces of nature relevant at accessible energies – the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. Science progresses in a much more muddled fashion than is often pictured in history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious. Consequently, historians of science often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had. These alternate points of view are less clearly developed than the final theories, harder to understand and easier to forget, especially as these are viewed years later, when it all really does make sense. Thus reading history one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the element of triumph. The emergence of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, is a wonderful example of the evolution from farce to triumph. During a very short period, a transition occurred from experimental discovery and theoretical confusion to theoretical triumph and experimental confirmation. We were lucky to have been young then, when we could stroll along the newly opened beaches and pick up the many beautiful shells that experiment had revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a scientific discipline that went from experiments with less electronics than a videocassette recorder to 105 channels and from collaborations with 5–10 members to 300 during the years 1964–1979, the notion of what high-energy physics is, or what constitutes being a high-energy physicist, cannot be viewed simply as an immutable category that is “out there” – that remains fixed despite these and other developments. What high energy physics is as a discipline and what it means to be a high-energy physicist are renegotiated by participants relative to the experimental and theoretical practices of the field at any given time. In this chapter I will explore some of the sociological consequences of the decisions made by high-energy physicists as they constructed the edifice that has come to be known as the Standard Model. Many of these physicists' decisions about the Standard Model have already been carefully documented in Andrew Pickering's sociological history of the development of particle physics, as well as numerous chapters from this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most striking thing about the papers presented in this session is that, aside from Sharon Traweek, the speakers have tended to gloss over or to ignore completely the presence of controversy and conflict in the treatment of their topics. Of course, it is always dangerous for an historian to draw attention to this dimension of the way scientists present the past. We lay ourselves open to two kinds of charges. First, that we are simply interested in muckraking, in giving physicists a bad press, in seeking to wash dirty linen in public so as to create a sensation and to boost our own visibility. Second, while physicists admit that they do sometimes disagree, they also insist that the community rapidly converges on a shared understanding of events. Historians who stress controversy are simply exaggerating, blowing up out of proportion what are simply normal, unimportant differences of opinion between rational human beings. For my part let me say at once that yes, we do perhaps have a tendency to concentrate on controversy. Writing history would be pretty boring otherwise! On the other hand, this is done not to titillate, but with far more important aims in mind. Indeed it amounts to a very different way of dealing with the past than that conventionally favored by scientists themselves. Put crudely, scientists reflecting on their own history tend to start from the present and to cast their eyes back over the past, identifying highlights and allocating credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of colliding-beam devices can be traced back to 1956, when a group at the Midwestern Universities Research Association put forward the idea of particle stacking in circular accelerators. Of course, people who worked with particle accelerators had already speculated about the high center-of-mass energies attainable with colliding beams, but such ideas were unrealistic with the particle densities then available in normal accelerator beams. The invention of particle stacking fundamentally changed this situation. It opened up the possibility of making two intense proton beams collide with a sufficiently high interaction rate to enable experimentation in an energy range otherwise unattainable by known techniques. A group at CERN started investigating this possibility in 1957, first by studying a special two-way fixed-field alternating gradient accelerator and then in 1960 by turning to the idea of two intersecting storage rings that could be fed from the CERN 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron (PS). This change in concept for these initial studies was stimulated by the promising performance of the PS at the very start of its operation in 1959. In 1961 the Accelerator Research Division at CERN had gained sufficient confidence to present its first proposal for a 2 x 25 GeV storage ring system. This system was intended essentially for protons, but other particles were mentioned in the proposal. This led to a series of important actions. First, in 1962, France offered a site next to the original CERN site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period that witnessed the rise of the Standard Model also saw radical change in the science policy and sociology of large laboratories. In the 15-year span from 1964 to 1979 the science policy climate in Europe and the United States evolved from the post–World War II golden age of strong political support and burgeoning budgets to the current era of political vacillation and uncertain funding. As researchers investigating the fundamental nature of matter used fewer mammoth accelerators and larger, vastly more complicated detectors, requiring larger teams and more specialized workers, the social structure of large laboratories also was transformed. To help illuminate this pivotal moment, the conference organizers convened a panel on Science Policy and the Sociology of Big Laboratories. I chaired the panel, which included two other historians specializing in big science (Robert Seidel and John Krige), philosopher of science Mark Bodnarczuk, and four physicists who helped administer laboratories during these years (William Wallenmeyer, Wolfgang Panofsky, Maurice Goldhaber, and Norman Ramsey). The panel session, which consisted of 15-minute presentations by each panel member followed by a brief discussion period, was videotaped. Panofsky and Goldhaber also gave me written remarks. At the request of the conference organizers, I reviewed the videotape and written remarks and integrated, expanded, and placed into context common themes from the panel discussion to create this chapter. Panelists are quoted from the videotape of the panel session or from their texts, as indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broad sweep of theoretical claims and programs commands our attention: even the title of this book, The Rise of the Standard Model, points to theory as the capstone of physics. But outside the commitment of theorists to principles of their practice such as causality, determinism, unification, and symmetry breaking, there are commitments built into the hardware of the laboratory. Less dramatic perhaps, less often spoken of without doubt, these traditions of instrumentation shape the practice of experimental physics and embody views about the nature of acceptable empirical evidence. In this chapter, I want to explore the coming together of two great lines of instruments in the twentieth century: on one side, the image tradition instantiated in the sequence cloud chambers, nuclear emulsions, and bubble chambers. These devices make pictures, the delicate array of crisscrossed lines that have come to serve as symbols not only of particle physics but of physics more generally. On the other side, there stands a competing logic tradition, this one aiming not to make pictures but instead to produce counts – the staccato clicks of a Geiger–Müller counter rather than the glossy print from a cloud chamber. In the line of such counters came a host of other electronic devices that built their persuasive power not through the sharpness of images but through the accumulation of a statistically significant number of clicks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History conferences are designed to set the record straight or, depending on where you stand, make it as crooked as it can possibly be. In this case I intend to personalize the story and the complicated reason is that the discovery of the bottom quark, almost exactly fifteen years ago, was the culmination of a series of events in experimental physics which go back to the discovery of the muon neutrino just thirty years ago, in 1962. I think it's important to emphasize that this story is one of missed opportunities, abysmal judgment, monumental blunders, stupid mistakes, and inoperative equipment. It was leavened only by the incredible luck and incandescent good fortune which you all know is an essential ingredient for any physics career. Lest you sneer that I am displaying false modesty, I beg you to hold your opinion until you've seen the data. Preamble In the period Haim Harari called “From the fourth lepton to the fifth quark,” we found the muon neutrino but missed neutral currents. We discovered what became known as the Drell–Yan process but missed the J/ψ. We missed the J/ψ again at the ISR but stumbled on high-transverse-momentum hadrons. We missed the J/ψ at Fermilab in 1973, chasing single-direct-lepton yields that were a red herring. Then we found a false upsilon. But finally Nature, terrified that she would be stuck with us forever, yielded up her secret, the true upsilon (ϒ), hoping this would make us go away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]