[Jdm-society] Experimenter bias

[Reifman, Alan]

The discussion of possible experimenter bias in physics piqued my interest.  One of my hobbies is reading, and then blogging about, developments in particle physics.  I read a lot of books that seem to be intended for an educated general audience and are "lite" on the mathematics.  Authors I would read include Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, and Lee Smolin, as well as less well-known ones such as Peter Woit ("Not Even Wrong") and Robert Oerter ("The Theory of Almost Everything," on the Standard Model).  A much older book that would be relevant to the issue of experimenter bias in physics is one entitled "Constructing Quarks" by Andrew Pickering, published in 1984.  The book sets out to examine how the popularity of certain theories at a point in history can influence the interpretation of experimental results, as well as the more general acceptance or rejection of particular studies.  I wrote a piece about "Constructing Quarks" on my physics blog about a year and a half ago.  If you're interested, you can click on the link below, and then scroll down and look on the right-hand side to find and select the October 2005 archives.
 
http://watered-down-physics.blogspot.com/ <http://watered-down-physics.blogspot.com/> 
 
Alan Reifman, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Human Development and Family Studies
Texas Tech University
 
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