The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation

by Kent W. Staley

• ISBN13: 9780521174251
• ISBN10: 0521174252
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Originally published in 2004, The Evidence for the Top Quark offers both a historical and philosophical perspective on an important recent discovery in particle physics: evidence for the elementary particle known as the top quark. Drawing on published reports, oral histories, and internal documents from the large collaboration that performed the experiment, Kent Staley explores in detail the controversies and politics that surrounded this major scientific result. At the same time the book seeks to defend an objective theory of scientific evidence based on error probabilities. Such a theory provides an illuminating explication of the points of contention in the debate over the evidence for the top quark. Philosophers wishing to defend the objectivity of the results of scientific research must face unflinchingly the realities of scientific practice, and this book attempts to do precisely that.

Table of Contents

Figures and Tables	p. x
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Origins of the Third Generation of Matter	p. 8
Kaons and CP Violation	p. 11
The Standard History of the Standard Model	p. 14
The Sakata Model and the Nagoya Model	p. 15
Dialectical Materialism and Physical Theory	p. 19
The X-Particle and Quartets	p. 23
The Kobayashi and Maskawa Paper	p. 27
The Reception of Kobayashi and Maskawa's Paper	p. 30
Discussion: ôDogmatismö and Thematic Commitment	p. 37
Building a Detector and a Collaboration to Run It	p. 45
Introduction	p. 45
The Origins of CDF and Colliding Beams	p. 47
The CDF Detector	p. 52
A Detector Design far Uncertainty	p. 62
Getting Realistic	p. 70
Building the Detector - A Chronicle	p. 76
Discussion	p. 84
Doing Physics: CDF Closes in on the Top	p. 88
Watching the Detectors: Physics Begins at CDF	p. 88
Improving the Detector - How the SVX Was Won	p. 90
CDF Comes of Age: The 1988-1989 Run	p. 100
The Top Search Begins: The (Very Short) Race with UA2	p. 104
Run Ia and the DPF Event	p. 110
Top Search Strategies	p. 113
Conclusion	p. 130
Writing Up the Evidence: The Evolution of a Result	p. 133
The Lepton-Photon Meeting and the Origins of the Evidence Paper	p. 134
The ôOctober Massacreö and Writing the Evidence Paper	p. 139
The Choice of the SVX Tagging Algorithm	p. 141
The Excess of Tagged Z Events	p. 142
The SLT pT Cut	p. 143
The ôPseudo e-µ Eventö	p. 148
The Role of Kinematical Evidence	p. 150
Double-Tagged Events and Significance: What to Count?	p. 154
Endless Meetings and Nonconvergent Processes	p. 156
Evidence for the Top Quark: The Paper	p. 160
Run la at D-zero	p. 163
Some Features of the Process of Producing the Evidence Paper	p. 168
The Research Paper: The Pursuit of Experiment by Other Means	p. 172
Run Ib: ôObservationö of the Top Quark and Second Thoughts about ôEvidenceö	p. 175
Run Ib at CDF: A New Detector and a New Algorithm	p. 176
Another Bad October Meeting	p. 180
Another Competition over SVX b-Tagging	p. 182
The January 1995 Collaboration Meeting and the Observation Paper	p. 184
Observation of the Top Quark by D-zero	p. 187
Two Observation Papers	p. 189
Discussion: Detecting Bias with More Data and with Different Tests	p. 191
A Model of the Experiment: Error-Statistical Evidence the Top Quark	p. 201
Procedure	p. 202
Representation: Models	p. 204
A Hierarchy of Models	p. 206
Reconciling the Two Perspectives	p. 211
A Model of CDF's Ia Top Search Counting Experiment as a Statistical Test	p. 214
Error-Statistical Evidence	p. 221
Conclusion	p. 237
Bias, Uncertainty, and Evidence	p. 239
Introduction: Types of Experimental Success	p. 239
Predesignation and Tuning on the Signal	p. 243
The SLT Analysis	p. 250
What Experiment Did We Just Do? Bias, Tuning on the Signal, and the Reference Class	p. 260
After-Trial Attempts to Rescue the Experiment	p. 265
Objectivity, in Spite of It All	p. 274
Summary	p. 290
Epilogue	p. 293
Notes	p. 297
Methodological Appendix	p. 313
References	p. 317
Index	p. 335
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