An other great article over at PhysicsWeb. This one is a book review that is more on the philosophical side of things. The book is The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation by Kent Staley. It sounds so interesting because the book apparently highlights the rather large difference between what I sometimes call the "myth of science" and the nitty, gritty, dirty details of how science is actually done. (Somewhat relevant, I suppose, to the never ending thread on Positivism)
Most interesting is that the author suggests that the history of the discovery of the top quark doesn't really fit easily into the standard views within history of science. The reviewer doesn't appear to really like this section with its apparent assumption that the reader is familiar with epistemic issues in the philosophy of science. That's probably true, but that also sounds like the most interesting section in my eyes. Specifically, it appears that the evidence was too strong to ignore but too weak to really count as "fact." It's always these middle places that I find so interesting, if only because I think they are far more common than we like to think. Further, I obviously think they are relevant for religious issues (as was hinted at in the positivist discussion).
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Blogged by Clark Goble