Allan Franklin

The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves

This volume is an attempt to reconstitute the tacit knowledge - the shared, unwritten assumptions, values and understandings - that shapes the work of science. Jed Z. Buchwald uses as his focus the social and intellectual world of 19th-century German physics. Drawing on the lab notes, published papers and unpublished manuscripts of Heinrich Hertz, Buchwald recreates Hertzs 1887 invention of a device that produced electromagnetic waves in wires. The invention itself was serendipitous and the device was quickly transformed, but Hertzs early experiments led to major innovations in electrodynamics. Buchwald explores the difficulty Hertz had in reconciling the theories of other physicists, including Hermann von Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell, and he considers the complex and often problematic connections between theory and experiment. In this first detailed scientific biography of Hertz and his scientific community, Buchwald demonstrates that tacit knowledge can be recovered so that we can begin to identify the unspoken rules that govern scientific practice.

How to Avoid the Experimenters’ Regress

Harry Collins is well known for both his skepticism concerning experimental results and evidence and for what he calls the “experimenters’ regress,” the view that a correct outcome is one obtained with a good experimental apparatus, whereas a good experimental apparatus is one that gives the correct outcome. He has expressed this view at length in Changing Order (Collins 1985).

Selectivity and Discord: Two Problems of Experiment

Selectivity and Discord addresses the fundamental question of whether there are grounds for belief in experimental results. Specifically, Allan Franklin is concerned with two problems in the use of experimental results in science: selectivity of data or analysis procedures and the resolution of discordant results. By means of detailed case studies of episodes from the history of modern physics, Franklin shows how these problems can be - and are - solved in the normal practice of science and, therefore, that experimental results may be legitimately used as a basis for scientific knowledge.

Comment on "The Structure of a Scientific Paper" by Frederick Suppe

On the basis of an analysis of a single paper on plate tectonics, a paper whose actual content is nowhere in evidence, Frederick Suppe concludes that no standard model of confirmation-hypotheticodeductive, Bayesian-inductive, or inference to the best explanationcan account for the structure of a scientific paper that reports an experimental result. He further argues on the basis of a survey of scientific papers, a survey whose data and results are also absent, that papers which have a rather stringent length limit, such as the one on plate tectonics, are typical of science. Thus, he concludes that no standard confirmation scheme is capable of dealing with scientific practice. Suppe also requires that an adequate model of philosophical testing should be able to account for everything in such scientific papers, in which space is at a premium. In the discussion below, we shall discuss only whether Suppes argument holds against the Bayesian confirmation theory we favor. We leave it to adherents of the other views to defend themselves. We agree that Suppes model of a paper is an adequate model of a certain type of short experimental paper, those published in letters journals or other journals such as Science or Nature. The question, however, is whether Bayesian confirmation theory can account for the structure of the argument offered in the paper. We believe that it can and does. Let us note, to begin with, that Suppes account conflates, or at least

Forging, cooking, trimming, and riding on the bandwagon

Recent accusations of scientific fraud have raised serious questions both for science policy and science itself. If experimental results cannot be trusted then science becomes virtually impossible. Four cases from twentieth‐century physics are examined to see if the normal procedures of science provide adequate safeguards against fraud. I conclude that repetition of experiments, particularly for those of theoretical importance, does provide a sufficient safeguard.

Did Millikan observe fractional charges on oil drops

We have reanalyzed Millikan’s 1913 data on oil drops to examine the evidence for charge quantization and for fractional residual charge. We find strong evidence in favor of charge quantization and no convincing evidence for fractional residual charges on the oil drops.

The Role of Experiments in the Natural Sciences: Examples from Physics and Biology

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of experiments in the natural sciences with examples from physics and biology. Science is a reasonable enterprise based on experimental evidence, criticism, and rational discussion. Experiment provides the knowledge of the physical world and it is the experiment that provides the evidence, which grounds that knowledge. Correct theories of nature are an important goal of science. Theory can also provide guidance to experiment and help in validating an experimental result. Nevertheless, experiment can provide good reasons for believing in theories. Experiment plays several roles in science. One of which is to test theories and to provide the basis for scientific knowledge. Experiment can also call for a new theory, either by showing that an accepted theory is incorrect, or by exhibiting a new phenomenon, which needs explanation. Experiment can provide hints toward the structure or mathematical form of a theory and it can provide evidence for the existence of the entities involved in the theories. Experiment can also measure quantities that theory deems important. Finally, experiment may also have a life of its own, independent of theory.

Thomas Pynchon's "Classic" Presentation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

There has been little interest shown in Thomas Pynchons The Crying Of Lot 49 since its publication more than six years ago. The book was initially acknowledged in a series of reviews more noteworthy for their clever displays of vocabulary than for their insights.1 And there has been little of a critical nature to fill the gap.2 The book and its author deserve better of us than this. For, beneath the veneer of flashy, sometimes sophomoric, verbal humor, Mr. Pynchon presents us with a new and quite serious dimension of an age-old literary theme, a uniquely twentieth century definition of the element of fate. The Crying Of Lot 49 takes its place in a series of classic statements of the theme which begins in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, and encompasses the efforts of such figures as Oedipus, Hamlet, and Faust who are all bedeviled by the inevitable nexus of knowledge and evil. Pynchon grounds his literary themes in certain laws, theories, and speculations in the physical sciences—in particular, those of thermodynamics, entropy, and information theory. These topics reputedly were of more than passing

The missing piece of the puzzle: the discovery of the Higgs boson

The missing piece of the puzzle: the discovery of the Higgs boson On July 4, 2012 the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the large hadron collider jointly announced the discovery of a new elementary particle, which resembled the Higgs boson, the last remaining undiscovered piece of the standard model of elementary particles. Both groups claimed to have observed a five-standard-deviation (five sigmas) effect above background, the gold standard for discovery in high-energy physics. In this essay I will briefly discuss the how the CMS collaboration performed the experiment and analyzed the data. I will also show the experimental results.

The Road to the Neutrino

The usual potted history of the neutrino hypothesis that we find in textbooks goes something like this: Radioactivity—the spontaneous transformation of one element into another—produces α particles, or β particles, or γ rays. Experimental work on the energy of the electrons emitted in β decay began early in the 20th century, and the observations posed a problem: If there were only two bodies (the daughter nucleus and an electron) in the final state of a β decay, the conservation of energy and momentum would require that the spectrum of decay electrons must be monoenergetic. Thus, the observation of a continuous spectrum—electrons emitted with all energies from zero up to a maximum that depended on the radioactive element—cast doubt on both of these conservation laws. Or perhaps the electrons lost varying amounts of energy in escaping the radioactive substance, thus accounting for the continuous energy spectrum. But careful experiments showed that this was not the case. So the problem persisted. In the ear...