Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' Acknowledgments
- Photographs of the Symposium
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Mathematical Notation
- Part One Introduction
- Part Two Quarks and Leptons
- Part Three Toward Gauge Theories
- Part Four Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- 15 The Rise of Colliding Beams
- 16 The CERN Intersecting Storage Rings: The Leap into the Hadron Collider Era
- 17 Development of Large Detectors for Colliding-Beam Experiments
- 18 Pure and Hybrid Detectors: Mark I and the Psi
- 19 Building Fermilab: A User's Paradise
- 20 Panel Session: Science Policy and the Social Structure of Big Laboratories
- 21 Some Sociological Consequences of High-Energy Physicists' Development of the Standard Model
- 22 Comments on Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- Part Five Electroweak Unification
- Part Six The Discovery of Quarks and Gluons
- Part Seven Personal Overviews
- Index
18 - Pure and Hybrid Detectors: Mark I and the Psi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' Acknowledgments
- Photographs of the Symposium
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Mathematical Notation
- Part One Introduction
- Part Two Quarks and Leptons
- Part Three Toward Gauge Theories
- Part Four Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- 15 The Rise of Colliding Beams
- 16 The CERN Intersecting Storage Rings: The Leap into the Hadron Collider Era
- 17 Development of Large Detectors for Colliding-Beam Experiments
- 18 Pure and Hybrid Detectors: Mark I and the Psi
- 19 Building Fermilab: A User's Paradise
- 20 Panel Session: Science Policy and the Social Structure of Big Laboratories
- 21 Some Sociological Consequences of High-Energy Physicists' Development of the Standard Model
- 22 Comments on Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- Part Five Electroweak Unification
- Part Six The Discovery of Quarks and Gluons
- Part Seven Personal Overviews
- Index
Summary
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.
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- The Rise of the Standard ModelA History of Particle Physics from 1964 to 1979, pp. 308 - 337Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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