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The Case of Madame Wu Experiment on Parity Violation

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The Case of Madame Wu Experiment on Parity Violation HISTORY OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION Toward a history of explanation in science communication: the case of Madame Wu experiment on parity violation Eugenio Bertozzi Abstract By focusing on a specific episode of 20th Century physics — the discovery of parity violation in 1957 — the paper presents a study of the types of explanations of the crucial experiment as they are found in different editorial categories: a peer-review journal, a popular science book, an encyclopedia and a newspaper articles. The study provides a fine-grained description of the mechanism of the explanation as elaborated in non-specialist accounts of the experiment and identifies original, key-explanatory elements which characterize them. In so doing, the paper presents a reflection on the processes of transformation and adaptation implied by the circulation of knowledge — which features as a productive process in its own right — and shows which further insights a focus on explanation can offer to the current historical researches on science communication. Keywords History of public communication of science; Popularization of science and technology; Public understanding of science and technology Introduction Explanation in Science traditionally belongs to the research interests of several scholarly disciplines; as attested by the book Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science, published in 2004 and edited by John Cornwell, the topic can be taken as pivot around which contributions from philosophy, mathematics, physics and linguistic can be articulated. According to the authors of the book, the exploration of the ‘mechanisms, validity, connections and disparities between various forms and style of explanation employed in science’ can provide a significant contribution to the public understanding of science [Cornwell, 2004, p. xviii]. Moreover, explanations in science provided fruitful material to researches focused on the rhetoric of popular science, its role and place within the scientific discourse [Fahnestock, 1986; Myers, 2003; Schickore, 2001; Charney, 2003; Paul, 2004] and to the (still on-going) debate concerning the relation between explanation and understanding from a philosophical perspective [de Regt, 2013]. However, if explanation is considered as a mean for making science contents accessible to a wide audience a still provoking insight into the matter is provided by Albert Einstein in the forward to Lincon Barnett’s popular book on relativity: “Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt. Either he Article Journal of Science Communication 16(03)(2017)A10 1 succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem [. ] or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further” [Einstein, 1948]. And yet, over the time, several attempts have been made in order to go through the Scylla and Charybdis abyss of deceit and discouragement depicted by Einstein, who himself put significant efforts in this respect. This paper investigates such attempts in the case of a specific episode of 20th Century physics — the crucial experiment for the discovery of parity violation in 1956. In particular, four accounts of the experiment taken from different editorial categories -a peer-review journal, a popular science book, an encyclopedia and a newspaper articles — are analyzed and compared: if the transmission of knowledge implies transformation, translation and adaptation, the aim is to identify the processes according to which these processes happen and to understand if, why and how the circulation of knowledge can be considered a productive process in its own right [Secord, 2004]. In this respect, the study here developed identifies original, key-explanatory elements which emerge and stabilize when the results starts to circulate outside the inner circle of the peers; in so doing, the study shows that, for the understanding of the circulation of knowledge, issues of transformations instead of degradation and of interchanges instead of question of origins become more prominent and significant [Hilgartner, 1990; Beer, 1990]. The specific episode chosen as case study is the experiment performed by the team led by Chien-Shiung Wu — known also as Madame Wu or the first lady of physics — in the late 1956 and early 1957 at the US National Bureau of Standards on “parity violation”. This experiment made to collapse the universal assumption of physics that the symmetry of parity was respected by all the known interactions between particles (electromagnetic, strong and weak) by showing that, at least for the weak, the assumption fails. Section 2 is devoted to the introduction of the historical episode and its main characters. In section 3 I will develop the analysis by considering how the experiment and its results have been presented in the original paper, in newspapers, pedagogical-oriented accounts, popular science books and literary fiction. In section 4 I will speculate on the meaning of tracing an history of explanation in science communication and how the study of the explaining strategies opens up to new possibilities for historical researches. On the discovery Symmetry (or asymmetry) properties of natural objects and species have long been of parity violation classificatory criteria used by science in the study of the Nature; at the same, and its human artefacts such as mosaics are meaningful exhibit of the fruitful partnership explanations established between mathematical symmetry transformations and aesthetic criteria of beauty. However, a third, specific meaning of symmetry is particularly interesting for the present paper: the one according to which, symmetry relates to indistinguishability.1 An early example of this use goes back to Galileo Galilei and 1For a wide discussion of the different uses of symmetry in physics beyond the one here considered, see Brading and Castellani [2003]. JCOM 16(03)(2017)A10 2 the thought experiment reported his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems of 1632: in it, the scientist tries to persuade the reader that, if she/he were in the hull of a windowless ship looking at the flight of a fly, at the spilling of the water from a recipient, walking, jumping, throwing an object to a companion. she/he wouldn’t be able to distinguish whether the vessel is at rest on the dock or whether is moving at a constant speed. In fact, all the effects are going to be the same in both the two situations which turn to be indistinguishable. The invariance for relative motion transformations or “Galileo transformation” — a symmetry property of the systems moving at constant speed — is today so embedded in the common perception to make sometimes hard to believe that there has been a time in which the performance of such a test — even mental as it was — had been necessary.2 Analogously, the symmetry for parity transformations possessed the same persuasive character of plausibility and self-evidence which made the search for a proof almost unessential: however, in this case, suggestions for a test quickly turned into a series of “crucial experiments” which made to collapse an assumption which had been so easy to accept.3 Which are, in this case, the two situations to compare and/or the test experiment(s) which are to be performed? The accounts discussed in the present paper make a point in answering these questions, digging out and conveying that flavor of immediateness and plausibility which makes the assumption on parity conservation sounding acceptable. Nevertheless, the question is here momentarily postponed in favor of a recollection of the events which revolved around the “downfall of parity”. That the stakes was high for the scientific community is witnessed by a phrase of the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli who linked the meaning of this symmetry no less than to the handedness of god: “I do not believe that the Lord is weak left-hander, and I am ready to bet a high sum that the experiments will give a symmetrical distribution of electron”.4 In a time of not instantaneous global communications, Pauli wrote these words in Zurich on 17 January 1957 without being aware that, during a press conference held at the Columbia University two days earlier, a group of researchers presented the results of a series of experiments which showed that, following the theological metaphor, god is really ‘left-handed’, at least in one of its four fundamental manifestations, the so called weak interactions. The first experiment has been performed by a team led by the Sino-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in the last months of 1956 at the National Bureau of 2The thought experiment is also referred to as “Galileian invariance”, “Galileian relativity principle” or even “Galileo’s ship” [Galilei, 1632/2001, day four]. Wigner argues that Galileo still makes an implicit use of symmetry principles while the first one who explicitly assumed them in the derivation of a theory has been Albert Einstein in the theory of special relativity [Wigner, 1967]. 3The parity operator was introduced in 1927 by the theoretical physicist, engineer and mathematician Eugene Paul Wigner [Wigner, 1927]. Differently from the Galileo transformations, which involve space and time coordinates, the parity transformations involve only space coordinates. 4Letter from Pauli to Weisskopf. The episode is reported in Tung-Mow Yan [1992]. JCOM 16(03)(2017)A10 3 Standards in the United States:5 working on an hypothesis advanced by the theoretical physicists Lee and Yang in ’56 [Lee and Yang, 1957], Wu and collaborators caught the effect by analyzing the beta decay of polarized Cobalt nuclei. Accordingly to the fame of Wu as extremely fine experimentalist, accustomed at providing data to a high degree of reliability, she did not give any formal scientific communication before the 15th of January 1957. On that day, the editor of the prestigious journal Physical Review received the letter Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay where the results were announced [Wu et al., 1957].
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