Session R3 - Physics and Society Awards followed by FPS Business Meeting.
INVITED session, Monday afternoon, April 07
Commonwealth A, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
The discovery of quarks during the 1960s and 1970s provides an excellent example of the manner by which a theoretical hypothesis becomes established as an “objective” reality. Quarks are now taken for granted by the entire physics community. During the first decade of its existence, however, the quark hypothesis of Gell-Mann and Zweig was only one of many competing physical ideas — and it was not a particularly fashionable one, either — about the fundamental nature of the subnuclear realm. Eventually the accumulation of experimental data could accommodate no other option; all other hypotheses fell by the wayside and are now long forgotten. Practical insights from this process of theory justification will be applied to the theoretical ideas of present-day particle physics and cosmology. Of principal concern is whether some of these fashions can ever be subjected to similar experimental verification, and thus have a chance of becoming scientific fact.