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Do Mutants Have to be Slain, or Do They Die of Natural Causes?: The Case of Atomic Parity Violation Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Allan Franklin
Allan Franklin*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

In Constructing Quarks (1984) Andrew Pickering discussed the early experiments on atomic parity violation performed at Oxford University and at the University of Washington and published in 1976 and 1977. The results disagreed with the predictions of the Weinberg-Salam (W-S) theory of unified electroweak interactions. Another experiment, performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1978, on the scattering of polarized electrons from deuterons confirmed the theory. Pickering regards the Oxford and Washington experiments as mutants, slain by the SLAC experiment.

By 1979 the W-S theory was regarded by the high-energy physics community as established, despite the fact that as Pickering recounts, “there had been no intrinsic change [emphasis in original] in the status of the Washington-Oxford experiments.” (Pickering 1984, p. 301).

Type
Part XII. Three Views of Experiment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 487 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

This paper is a very abbreviated version of the arguments presented in Chapter 8 of Franklin (1990).

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