In this chapter I will discuss an episode from contemporary physics, that of atomic parity violation experiments and their relation to the Weinberg-Salam unified theory of electroweak interactions. This will continue my discussion of the interaction between experiment and theory and of the epistemology of experiment. It will also explore some of the differences between my view of science and that proposed by the “strong programme” or social constructivist view in the sociology of science.

This strong programme view has been summarized by Trevor Pinch.

A central feature of this view is that change in the content of scientific knowledge is to be explained or understood in terms of the social and/or cognitive interests of the scientists involved.

There is a sense in which I am in agreement with this symmetrical view. The evidence model I have suggested explains adherence to scientific beliefs in terms of their relationship to valid experimental evidence.

In late 1956 and early 1957 the situation changed dramatically. Following a suggestion by Lee and Yang (1956) that parity, or mirror symmetry, might be violated in the weak interactions, which included β decay, a series of experiments by Wu and her collaborators (1957), by Garwin, Lederman, and Weinrich (1957), and by Friedman and Telegdi (1957a) showed conclusively that this was the case. This discovery had serious implications for the previous analyses of β decay, suggested new experiments, and pointed the way toward a new theory of β decay.

We can summarize the history of this discovery as follows. During the 1950s the physics community was faced with what was known as the “θ–τ puzzle.” On one set of accepted criteria, that of identical masses and lifetimes, the θ and τ particles appeared to be the same particle. On another set of accepted criteria, that of spin and parity, they appeared to be different. The spin and parity analysis was performed on the decay products, two pions for the θ and three pions for the τ. Parity conservation was assumed in these decays and the spin and parity of the θ and τ were inferred. There were several attempts to solve this puzzle within the framework of currently accepted theories, but all of these were unsuccessful.

In 1956, Lee and Yang recognized that a possible solution to the problem would be the nonconservation of parity in the weak interactions.

As we saw in the last chapter, there was no generally agreed upon theory of muon decay processes in the early 1950s, although the decays were consistent with an STP combination. It was known that the coupling constants for those processes were approximately equal to those for nuclear β decay. This suggested the idea of a Universal Fermi Interaction that would apply to all weak interactions. The situation was quite different in the area of β-decay theory, where a consensus existed. In his 1943 review of the theory, Konopinski had noted the general support for Fermi's theory with a preference for the Gamow-Teller interaction involving the tensor (T) or axial vector (A) forms of the interaction. By the time of a 1953 review article by Konopinski and Langer, they stated, “As we shall interpret the evidence here, the correct law must be what is known as an STP combination” (1953, p. 261, emphasis added). In this section I will examine the evidence and arguments for this definite conclusion, which, as the subsequent history will show, was wrong, but not unreasonable.

There were several attempts, based on general theoretical principles, to reduce the arbitrariness of the forms of the interactions involved in β decay. Recall that Critchfield and Wigner (1941) and Critchfield (1943) had, on the basis of symmetry considerations, found that the antisymmetric sum of the S, A, and P forms would fit the data.

A skeptical reader, after reading the history presented in the first five chapters, might question whether or not science is the reasonable enterprise based on valid experimental evidence that I believe it is. They might say that the demonstrated fallibility of experimental results, of theoretical calculation, and of the comparison between experiment and theory casts serious doubt on that assertion. I agree that the fallibility is worrisome, but I also believe that the corrigibility shown gives us hope that science is indeed a reasonable enterprise. We not only learn from our mistakes, but we are able to correct them. In this chapter I will argue that we have good reasons for belief in the validity of experimental results. I will discuss later how we can use the results in the construction of a reasonable, dare one say, rational, science.

THE BAYESIAN APPROACH TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

I will adopt a Bayesian approach to the philosophy of science. Bayesianism is based on the idea that we have degrees of belief in statements or hypotheses, and that these degrees of belief obey the probability calculus. [For an excellent introduction to the Bayesian view see Howson and Urbach (1989).] There has been considerable discussion of what kind of probabilities these are. I believe that they are subjective probabilities reflecting the judgments of scientists.

Scientists need no convincing that experiment plays an essential role in science. It provides the basis for theory choice, confirms or refutes hypotheses or theories, and sometimes calls for new theories. These are only a few of its roles and, as Ian Hacking (1983) has pointed out, experiment often has a life of its own. Nevertheless, I called my previous book The Neglect of Experiment (1986). Who was neglecting experiment? Certainly not scientists. I believed then that it was historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. Even among those who acknowledged the importance of experimental results there tended to be an almost mythological treatment of a few standard exemplary experiments, such as Galileo and the Leaning Tower, Young's double slit interference experiment, and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Actual experiments were rarely discussed.

Fortunately, this is no longer the case. One of the most interesting and exciting trends in history, philosophy, and sociology of science in the 1980s has been the study of and emphasis on actual experiments. Philosophers such as Dudley Shapere (1982), Ian Hacking (1983), Nancy Cartwright (1983), and Robert Ackermann (1985) have used the actual practice of science to analyze and illuminate what good science should be. Historians such as Bruce Wheaton (1983), Peter Galison (1987), and Roger Stuewer (1975) have not only provided us with detailed studies of particular experiments, but have also given us new perspectives on the role of real experiments. Sociologists of science have added to our knowledge by their detailed studies of experiments.

In an interview filmed just a few weeks before his death, Richard Feynman described his search for Tannu Tuva. Tannu Tuva was a small country in Asia, now part of the Soviet Union, known in the West primarily for its triangular postage stamps. Feynman wanted to visit Tannu Tuva, but didn't want to take advantage of his reputation as a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. He wanted to do it, as he put it, “in the right way.” His efforts to arrange a visit spanned several years. In the process he learned to write Tuvan and became familiar with Tuvan singing. Feynman's invitation to Tannu Tuva arrived two weeks after his death.

Science is like Feynman's quest. The most important thing is to do it “in the right way.”

THE SUGGESTION OF V-A THEORY

The situation discussed at the end of the last chapter was described in papers that proposed that a Universal Fermi Interaction, one that applied to all weak interactions, was a linear combination of V and A. The theory was offered by Sudarshan and Marshak (1957, 1958) and by Feynman and Gell-Mann (1958). This was exactly the opposite conclusion drawn four years earlier by Konopinski and Langer, who had stated, “As we shall interpret the evidence here, the correct law must be what is known as an STP combination” (1953, p. 261).

Sudarshan and Marshak examined the available evidence from nuclear β decay and other weak interactions, including strange particle decays, and concluded that the only possible choice for a Universal Fermi Interaction was a linear combination of V and A, even though there was evidence apparently in conflict with this choice. The four experiments cited in opposition to the V-A theory were

1. The electron–neutrino angular correlation experiment on He6 by Rustad and Ruby (1953, 1955), which gave T as the β-decay interaction.

2. The sign of the electron polarization from muon decay.

3. The frequency of the electron mode in pion decay.

4. The asymmetry in polarized neutron decay, which was smaller than predicted.

They suggested,

All of these experiments should be redone, particularly since some of them contradict the results of other recent experiments on the weak interactions.

A LIFE OF ITS OWN

After the discussion of the previous six chapters, a reader might be strongly tempted to believe that experiment derives its meaning and significance solely from its relation to theory. We have mentioned the roles that experiment plays in confirming, refuting, and choosing between theories. We have also discussed the role of theory in the validation of experimental results.

As Ian Hacking (1983) has pointed out, however, experiment often has a life of its own. Although we began our history of experiment and the theory of weak interactions with Fermi's (1934) theory of β decay, the subject had been studied experimentally for more than thirty years in the absence of any accepted theory of the phenomena. Similarly, from the discovery of superconductivity by Kamerlingh Omnes in 1911 until the phenomenological theory of London and London in 1935 the experimental study of the effect proceeded in the absence of any successful theory. In fact, one might argue that the experimental discovery of the Meissner effect, the exclusion of a magnetic field from the interior of a superconductor, was a crucial step for the development of the theory. This suggests another role for experiment, that of giving hints toward a successful theory.

Sometimes experiments are done because the phenomena are seen to be interesting. In addition one might wish to acquire data that a future theory will have to explain.

It would be misleading to devote this book only to Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne, since the inference might be that their peculiar historical struggles had something to do with their peculiarly unsettled time. So I shall update the discussion by a century, to take up Dreiser (in relation to Brown), Pynchon (in relation to Poe), and Mailer (in relation to Hawthorne). But the grouping of Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer in itself makes possible an approach to the real essence of the historical negotiation of literature with science. What Dreiser faces in Spencerian evolution is the threat that scientific history is a synecdoche for universal history, since the universe, like science, progresses in the direction of integrating, definite heterogeneity. No more fundamental challenge to any other historical sense can be imagined. Pynchon's use of thermodynamics for his scientific metaphor, then, can be understood as a discovery within science that universal history does not mimic scientific history: The universe is in fact heading for indefinite homogeneity. Dreiser and Pynchon do not put up their own version of history against science; they try to suspend our belief in the universality of the scientific version. Mailer's ambition is to find an alternative, and he does so in perhaps the most radical way possible: by reinventing the Renaissance theory of signatures, which he calls the “metaphysics of form,” to repeal the Scientific Revolution.

SISTER CARRIE, BROTHER ARTHUR

I want to begin by begging the question of whether Dreiser was “influenced” by “science” (the quotation marks show where the question is being begged).

Our intellectual age is antidisciplinarian. At approximately the moment that C. P. Snow decided to inform the world, in a lecture that is mysteriously still famous, that intellectual life was divided by scientists and humanists into warring camps, some of the liminal thinkers and writers of our time were shaping our current sense of the full permeability and sympathetic interrelationship of disciplines. Unknown to Snow, but nearly as he spoke, Thomas Kuhn and Paul K. Feyerabend were independently formulating the idea that successive scientific theories manufacture conflicting conceptual universes out of skewed concepts; since successive theories can never be properly measured against each other, scientific revolutions are at least partly irrational. The idea led to much excitement among humanists, and Feyerabend, if not Kuhn, has supported their inference that science can no longer assert its rational superiority to softer disciplines. Meanwhile, in France, Foucault was inventing the episteme, within which disciplines from the arts to the sciences may form a nexus, across which science does not necessarily evolve but rather may be thoroughly revolutionized. Once again, any notion that science differs from other fields by virtue of its unflagging rational progress seemed to have been invalidated. In America, Thomas Pynchon was beginning a career whose moral, for some critics, was that literature had discovered how much its survival depended on surrendering its high-tonedness and high-handedness with respect to illiterate science. Pynchon is still thought to have proved that modern literature must make poetry out of equations and chemical bonds.

In sympathy for literary Americanists who will not see the necessity of an opening chapter on intellectual history, I offer this apology. I found myself wanting to describe, with typical Americanist transdisciplinary fervor, the relationship of science and American literature, but could find no model of intellectual history that would do justice to the subject – that would save the phenomenon (the anxiety of disciplinary relations) and not dissolve it. If I had considered literature (in the manner of Marjorie Hope Nicolson) to be moving gratefully behind science through history, or (in the manner of Karl Popper) as working diligently on problems given to it by science, or (in the manner of Michel Serres) as not essentially different from science, then I would have lost all the border tension between the principalities of literature and science that alone makes sense of the intellectual maneuvers of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Pynchon, and Norman Mailer.

Readers of this book will therefore be making a mistake if they believe that the first half of Chapter 1 is engaged in controversies in intellectual history and philosophy of science for their own sake. Within that chapter, I try to slide gracefully from these abstract disputes to introducing the particular intellectual contortions of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne entirely for the purpose of suggesting the ways in which my theoretical and practical concerns have determined each other. Chapter 1 is, as a result, both preamble and conclusion. Nevertheless, I do not advise readers who prefer their evidence before their generalizations to skip to the second chapter.

IS SCIENCE DEADLY DULL?

Attend now to the first tactic of the opening strategy of Poe's Byzantine, necessary negotiation with science. The negotiation would last to the final and perhaps climactic performance of his career, Eureka, so that Poe's life as a creative writer would be imperfectly framed against the context of progressive, ingressive science.

But why “Old” Time, if Poe, who despised progress, loathed science as purveyor of the new?

The premise of my answer is that Poe's real quarrel in this poem is not so much with science, which by 1829 was far beyond any “dull realities” that Poe could disdain, as with Bacon – “Hog” in Poe's sometimes scurrilous Eureka. It is Bacon who sets up the very epithet that Poe twists against him:

1. In “Of Innovations,” Bacon writes: “It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations, would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived.” However, though knowledge ought to imitate time's deliberateness, Bacon stipulates that it must move deliberately in the opposite direction, since “time of course alters things to the worse.” In “Sonnet,” Poe asserts that science, true daughter of Old Time, “alterest all things” in the way a vulture alters carrion. Poe turns Bacon's metaphor against Bacon by portraying the offspring as rather too reminiscent of the parent.

2. […]

THE ANXIETIES OF ALIENATION

Twice-Told Tales has very few men of science – Aylmer, Rappaccini, and the virtuosi of “The Hall of Fantasy” populate Mosses From an Old Manse – but it does have Doctor Cacaphodel of “The Great Carbuncle.” Is Cacaphodel a scientist? This is the sort of question that turns up frequently in Hawthorne criticism: Is Aylmer himself a scientist? Rappaccini himself? We will not get very far in appraising Hawthorne's relation to science if we shirk the issue. But in this case, there is a very good reason for shirking it. It was in 1840 that Whewell decided that the men of inductive science needed a collective name, and made up the epithet “scientist” for them. Twice-Told Tales was published in 1837, before there was any such thing.

This is more than an accident of nomenclature, though Whewell proposed the term “scientist” nonchalantly: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.” That is all Whewell urged on behalf of the coinage, but in fact, the scientist's right to the appellation had been only recently earned by a momentous historical development that Whewell's book exists to theorize. There were scientists (not just, say, chemists and astronomers) not because the discipline was becoming less specialized, but because there had emerged a “science” whose success in discovering definite truths could be analyzed across a considerable spectrum of specializations.