Adrian Wuethrich is a research and teaching associate ("wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter") in history of science at the Technical University Berlin. His visit to the CPNSS is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science in 2009 from the University of Bern. He is the author of the Genesis of Feynman Diagrams (2010) and articles on locality and causality principles in the derivation of Bell's inequality
Dates of Visit: October 2014 - March 2015
Email: adrian.wuethrich@tu-berlin.de
Project Title: Justifying the existence of the Higgs boson: The logic of a "five sigma" discovery
Project Description: The project aims to identify types of inferences that lead particle physicists to the claim of having discovered a new particle with almost
100 per cent certainty. A central part of the project is the attempt to reconstruct important parts of the research processes at CERN by using documents from the communication among the physicists in the ATLAS collaboration. Such a case study promises to shed light on how philosophical problems such as the one of "unconceived alternatives" and the one of finding criteria for "best explanations" are dealt with in the practice of high energy physics. The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 145409).