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.