Abstract
In this paper, we employ Ian Hacking’s insight that “unity” has a double meaning, singleness and harmonious integration, to revisit a major episode from the recent history of CERN: the UA1 and UA2 experiments in the early 1980s, which led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. CERN is a complex institution, where diverse groups are called upon to cooperate. We argue that this lack of unity, in the first sense of the term, is counterbalanced by specific mechanisms of integration, so that CERN achieves its standing as a unified organization. The UA1/UA2 episode highlights this interplay between unity and disunity. The UA2 experiment was designed and carried out in order to confirm the validity of the results obtained by UA1. The two experimental teams, working independently and with different mentalities, built separate detectors and refrained from systematically sharing their data. This gave rise to strong antagonisms and diametrically opposed opinions over what conclusions could legitimately be drawn from the resulting data. Our analysis focuses on the mechanisms which compensated for that disunity and eventually led to a unified consensus between UA1 and UA2.
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Notes
The fact that 72% of the physicists who participated in this study agreed with the statement: “The CERN accelerators have been responsible for a relatively small number of major discoveries compared with the other main high-energy physics centres,” is noteworthy. Martin and Irvine, “CERN: II” (ref. 11), 282.
On the other hand, several physicists mentioned the flexibility and even opportunism of the Brookhaven management, during the 1960s and 1970s, in re-orienting the laboratory’s experimental program whenever an unexpected new possibility was presented Martin and Irvine, “CERN: II” (ref. 11), 282.
In fact, as we can read in the abstract of the aforementioned paper by Rubbia, McIntyre, and Cline, “Producing Massive Neutral Intermediate Vector Bosons” (ref. 26): “An antiproton source is added either to the Fermilab or the CERN SPS machines to transform a conventional 400 GeV accelerator into a pp colliding beam facility with 800 GeV in the center of mass (Eeq = 320,000 GeV).”
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As recounted by Donald Perkins, who played a fundamental role in the Gargamelle collaboration. Donald Perkins, “Gargamelle and the Discovery of Neutral Currents,” in The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, 428–46 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 444.
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This proposal was based on Carlo Rubbia, Peter McIntyre, and David Cline, “Producing Massive Neutral Intermediate Vector Bosons with Existing Accelerators,” paper delivered at the International Neutrino Conference in Aachen, Germany, (1976), https://cds.cern.ch/record/2137187/files/p175.pdf.
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As quoted in Taubes, Nobel Dreams (ref. 29), xx, 6.
As quoted in Taubes, Nobel Dreams (ref. 29), 41.
As quoted in Taubes, Nobel Dreams (ref. 29), 55.
See Galison, “How the First” (ref. 21); Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab Physics: the Frontier, and Megascience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 165–67. E1 was also called HPWF, as it included Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
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Out of the several thousand-million collisions, only a tiny handful would give signals corresponding to the production of a W and its subsequent decay into an electron (or positron if the W was positively charged) and a neutrino. The detectors were designed to look for high-energy electrons coming out at a relatively large angle to the beam direction. Furthermore, the energy imbalance of the particles around a decay indicated the production of a neutrino, which itself could not be detected directly in the experimental apparatus. The Z was more difficult to produce; the theory estimated its production rate to be some ten times lower than that of the W. However, its signature was easier to spot because it can decay into an electron–positron pair or a muon pair. For more details see “Finding the W and Z,” CERN Courier 53, no. 4, 2013, 27–28.
See John Krige, “Distrust and Discovery” (ref. 5); Taubes, Nobel Dreams (ref. 29).
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Krige, “Distrust and Discovery” (ref. 5).
As quoted in Peter Watkins, Story of the W and Z (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 185.
Krige, “Distrust and Discovery” (ref. 5), 536.
The title referred to the discovery of the W+, the W− and the Z0; “Europe 3, US Not Even Z-Zero,” New York Times, June 6, 1983, 16.
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John Krige, “Some Socio-Historical Aspects of Multinational Collaborations in High-Energy Physics at CERN Between 1975 and 1985,” in Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, ed. Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, 233–62 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1993), 246–47.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at the 2018 biennial conference of the European Society for the History of Science in London. We thank Panos Charitos for communicating that version to the editors of Physics in Perspective. We are grateful to Joe Martin for his suggestions on developing the paper into its present form. We are also thankful to Stathis Arapostathis, Vasiliki Christopoulou, Kostas Gavroglu, Stelios Kampouridis, Iraklis Katsaloulis, and Telly Tympas for helpful discussions. Last but not least, we are indebted to the CERN Director for International Relations, Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, for granting us access to the CERN archives, and to the CERN archivists, Anita Hollier, Jens Vigen and Sandrine Reyes for their substantial help in navigating those archives. Research for this paper was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant” (Project Number: 875).
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Grigoris Panoutsopoulos is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a BSc in Physics and a MA in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research has focused on the history of CERN and big science. Theodore Arabatzis is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has written on the history of modern physical sciences and on historical philosophy of science. He is President of the European Society for the History of Science (2020–22).
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Panoutsopoulos, G., Arabatzis, T. CERN’s Balancing Act Between Unity and Disunity: The “Sister Experiments” UA1 and UA2 and CERN’s First Nobel Prize. Phys. Perspect. 23, 181–201 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-021-00281-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-021-00281-5