[Sci-tech-public] David Kaiser at the History of Physical Sciences Working Group, 9/21

[Chitra Ramalingam]

The History of the Physical Sciences Working Group presents:

David Kaiser, MIT:

"Whose Mass is it Anyway?  Particle Cosmology and the Objects of Theory"
(abstract below)

Wednesday, September 21, 6pm
Science Center 469

Dinner will be provided - RSVP to ramaling at fas.harvard.edu. Please feel
free to circulate this announcement to interested parties.

Best,
Chitra

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         Physicists in different branches of the discipline were
puzzled by the problem of mass during the 1950s and 1960s:  Why do
objects have mass?  Around the same time, yet working independently,
specialists in gravitational studies and in particle theory proposed
that mass might arise due to objects' interactions with a new (and as
yet undetected) field.  Although the questions they posed and even
the answers they provided shared several similarities -- and even
though both proposals quickly became "hot topics" in their respective
subfields -- virtually no one discussed one proposal in the light of
the other for nearly twenty years.  Only after massive, unprecedented
changes in pedagogical infrastructure rocked the discipline in the
early 1970s did a new generation of physicists begin to see possible
links between the Brans-Dicke field and the Higgs field.  For the new
researchers, trained in different ways than most of their
predecessors, the two objects of theory were not only similar -- some
began to proclaim that they were exactly the same.  Charting the
histories of these two objects of theory thus illuminates the
complicated institutional and pedagogical factors that helped to
produce a new subfield of physics, particle cosmology, which today
ranks at the very forefront of modern physics.
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