Article ID: CBB962350764

CERN’s Balancing Act Between Unity and Disunity: The “Sister Experiments” UA1 and UA2 and CERN’s First Nobel Prize (2021)

unapi

In this paper, we employ Ian Hacking’s insight that “unity” has a double meaning, singleness and harmonious integration, to revisit a major episode from the recent history of CERN: the UA1 and UA2 experiments in the early 1980s, which led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. CERN is a complex institution, where diverse groups are called upon to cooperate. We argue that this lack of unity, in the first sense of the term, is counterbalanced by specific mechanisms of integration, so that CERN achieves its standing as a unified organization. The UA1/UA2 episode highlights this interplay between unity and disunity. The UA2 experiment was designed and carried out in order to confirm the validity of the results obtained by UA1. The two experimental teams, working independently and with different mentalities, built separate detectors and refrained from systematically sharing their data. This gave rise to strong antagonisms and diametrically opposed opinions over what conclusions could legitimately be drawn from the resulting data. Our analysis focuses on the mechanisms which compensated for that disunity and eventually led to a unified consensus between UA1 and UA2.

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Authors & Contributors
Wehrens, Rik
Menzel, Julia Harriet
Holmes, Matthew
Tsesmelis, Emmanuel
Savoia, Paolo
Pesic, Peter
Concepts
Experiments and experimentation
Physics
Philosophy of science
Scientific communities; interprofessional relations
Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics
Particle accelerators
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century, early
19th century
21st century
Early modern
Places
Europe
United States
Switzerland
West Germany
Spain
Germany
Institutions
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Solvay Conferences
University of Chicago
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