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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 5: Freie Sektion II

GP 5.3: Vortrag

Dienstag, 21. März 2017, 12:30–13:00, HSZ 105

Postulating and then sighting: a global perspective on the discovery of the Omega-minus — •Eugenio Bertozzi — Deutsches Museum, Munich

After the discovery of the Omega-minus in 1964, the magazine New Yorker reports that, in a dedicated talk, 5 physicists of the Brookhaven Laboratory in US explained the process of postulating the existence of a particle and then sighting it in a bubble chamber.

The process, mentioned but not discussed in the newspaper, is the object of the present paper. My aim is to look at the tiny track of the Omega-minus as the merging of two evolving practices: the handling of data produced by the bubble chambers - sighting - and the formulation of the theory on the base of symmetry principles - postulating.

I will relate the golden picture of 1964 to the specific detector and then consider the successive confirmations quickly coming from the European Laboratories, where similar instruments and strategies were being developed. In fact, as an *experimentalist's dream*, a specific prediction on which a theory could stand or fall, the Omega-minus has been the object of a full-scale search.

The focus on the instruments illuminates aspects of design of the big science apparatuses, efficiency of measurements and quality of the images. The talk explores the possibility provided to transitional historiographies by instruments which miss the primacy of the specific, ground-breaking result.