"The Discovery of the Top Quark",
by Tony Liss and Paul Tipton

---

This account of an astonishingly complex social project of establishing that there is a certain sub-sub-atomic entity with certain properties, which involved more than 1000 signatories to the research report generated as the last phase of the project, suggests that the usual philosophical account of scientific knowledge in terms of the certainty of the individual person has become impertinent. On the positive side, it also suggests that any account of knowledge that takes the results of scientific inquiry duly into account must involve recognition that such undertanding is socially distibuted, is a resultant of a communicational process, and has more to do with common acceptance than with individual conviction. It seems, in any case, to be a corroboration of Peirce's idea that science is best understood as a collaborative form of life and this or that particular science is of the nature of a communicational community unified by a common interest in finding out about something. The account of the particular discovery of concern here includes a very helpful and suggestive account of the collaborative activity that was involved in writing up a research report that would be acceptable to all who participated in the experimentation.

GO TO QUARK PAPER (PDF)
(chez Tony M. Liss)
or
Go back to LINKS page


Suggestion by: Joseph Ransdell