Distrust and Discovery: The Case of the Heavy Bosons at CERN

Abstract

This essay describes the microhistorical process whereby different groups of scientific actors (competing teams of physicists at the research front, the laboratory directorate) came to claim that a new fundamental particle (the W boson) had been discovered at CERN. Particular attention is paid to the role of trust, and of distrust, in the directorate's planning of the experimental program and in their interpretation and promotion of its first results. Distrust demanded independent replication; it also influenced the way in which the CERN director general managed the credibility of the results for the world's press, turning a plausible but not yet widely accepted hypothesis into an undisputed fact. Produced and circulated in a context that included physicists, funding agencies, governments, and national power blocs, the discovery of the bosons by physicists in Europe challenged American domination of the field and shaped U.S. accelerator policy for the 1990s.