History, Theory, and the Ziggurat of PhysicsImage and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Peter Galison

Abstract

Peter Galison's Image and Logic is an admirable and question-raising book. The questions concern two distinct human activities: the enterprise we call physics and the enterprise we call history of science. Galison's theme is the evolution of particle detectors from C. T. R. Wilson's cloud chamber (1895, 1911) and Hans Geiger's discharge counter (1908, 1913) to their giant multimillion-dollar offspring of today. Image and Logic is Galison's demarcation of two competing traditions: a mimetic exactness imaging trajectories of individual particles, and a logical exactness analyzing large numbers of particle events. As time went on and financial stakes rose, the two merged to yield hybrid devices such as the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) developed for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It was a transition from little to big physics inconceivable earlier. Midway came the amazingly productive cottage industry that Cecil Powell built on the nuclear emulsion technique of Marietta Blau. Galison's subtitle, A Material Culture of Microphysics, points to the shifts, intellectual and social as well as material, affecting physicists immersed in this ever-changing world.