Exploring the "dark ages" of particle physics: isospin, strangeness and the construction of physical-mathematical concepts in the pre-Standard-Model era (ca. 1950-1965)

该项目提出了对20世纪50年代和60年代粒子物理学知识生产的系统调查，当时意外的实验结果被概念化为具有“新”性质的“新”粒子，其中包括“同位旋”和“陌生性”。这些和其他物理数学概念后来被嵌入到标准模型中，当它在20世纪70年代作为第一个——也是迄今为止最成功的——粒子现象理论出现时。从那时起，前标准模型时代被认为是粒子物理学的“黑暗时代”：一个理论不确定和实验混乱的漫长阶段，直到标准模型的兴起才结束。旨在对这一观点进行批判性的重新评估，该项目构成了第一个彻底的历史分析，研究了20世纪50年代和60年代的概念发展，而不仅仅是作为标准模型的“前奏”。该项目以一种创新的历史哲学的方式关注概念的形成，而不是理论的构建，探索同位旋和陌生性的形成和发展的动力学，迄今为止，这些问题只是以一种随意的方式处理。这两个新的量子数确实“构成了新的和经验上有用的分析工具，用来理解20世纪50年代发现的许多新粒子的性质”（皮克林）。然而，用同位旋和奇异性对实验结果进行概念化并不是一个纯粹的经验动机的理论发明，而是一个复杂的动态过程，既受实验结果的驱动，又激发新的实验研究，既冲击着不同的理论和概念传统，同时又形成新的理论和概念传统。它应该被仔细地语境化，并在其与理论家和实验家所采用的实践的关系中进行探索。关于同位旋和陌生性概念的形成，作为理论和实验实践多层次相互作用的轨迹，拟议的项目将超越学科历史的限制，并有助于更广泛的关于概念形成动力学和现代科学中理论与实验关系的历史哲学讨论。

The project proposes a systematic investigation of knowledge production in particle physics of the 1950s and '60s, when unexpected experimental results came to be conceptualized in terms of "new" particles endowed with "new" properties, among them "isospin" and "strangeness". These and other physical-mathematical concepts later came to be embedded into the Standard Model, when it emerged in the 1970s as the first - and to date most successful - theory of particle phenomena. Since then, the pre-Standard-Model era has been regarded as a sort of "dark ages" of particle physics: a long phase of theoretical uncertainty and confusing experimental variety which ended only with the rise of the Standard Model. Aimed at a critical reassessment of this view, the project constitutes the first thorough historical analysis studying the conceptual developments of the 1950s and '60s in their own right, and not simply as a "prelude" to the Standard Model. With an innovative historical-philosophical focus on the formation of concepts rather than on the construction of theories, the project explores the dynamics of formation and development of isospin and strangeness, which has so far been dealt with only in an off-hand way. Those two new quantum numbers indeed "constituted new and empirically useful analytic tools with which to make sense of the properties of the many new particles discovered in the 1950s" (Pickering). However, the conceptualization of experimental results in terms of isospin and strangeness was no purely empirically motivated theoretical invention, but rather a complex dynamical process both driven by experimental results and stimulating new experimental research, both bearing on diverse theoretical and conceptual traditions and forming new ones at the same time. It should be carefully contextualised and explored in its relations to the practices employed both by theorists and experimentalists. Regarding the formation of concepts of isospin and strangeness as the locus of multilayered interplay of theoretical and experimental practices, the proposed project will go beyond the limits of a disciplinary history and contribute to the wider historical-philosophical discussion on the dynamics of concept formation and on the relationship of theory and experiment in modern science.