Franklin's career path from particle physics to philosophy of science

Franklin's career path from particle physics to philosophy of science

• Jan 09, 2022
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"They stopped physics classes to announce the experimental results of parity violation. That had a big effect on me."

I have described Allan Franklin as a physics historian, but that isn't quite right. He is a physicist who writes about history, or, more accurately, about philosophy. 

He trained at Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton as an experimental high-energy physicist, and has been on the physics faculty at the University Colorado since 1967. Today, he is Professor Emeritus of Physics at CU-Boulder. 

Along the way, he transitioned from experimental work on physical particles to investigations of the experimental process itself. As we have seen, his writings on experimental error—one of his areas of focus—raise provocative questions about the conduct of science. 

It also put him on a collision course with post-modern social constructionists whose sociological prism tended to discount the importance of experiment. Since the 1990s, he has stood up for empirical truths in ongoing jousts with constructionist scholars.  

We learn a little bit about all of this is an unfortunately disjointed American Institute of Physics oral history interview with Allan Franklin that was recorded in May 2020. The interviewer should have let Franklin speak at greater length on subjects, instead of asking new questions or interjecting his own thoughts.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of interesting new content for our purposes, mostly biographical. I knew Franklin was an undergrad at Columbia, but now we learn he was a Jewish kid from Bensonhurst, a background not unlike Stan's. 

His interest in experiment was kindled in those days. "They stopped physics classes to announce the experimental results of parity violation. That had a big effect on me," he recalls. 

He worked as an undergraduate with Eugene Commins in labs under Charles Townes and Polykarp Kusch, but he doesn't mention contact with Wu. 

When the interview finally gets around to mentioning Franklin's work on theoretical and experimental errors on the road to a unified V–A theory, it gets only a sentence or two of mention before the interviewer moves on. For us, here's the nut:

When you have a disagreement between theory and experiment, theory could be wrong, experiment could be wrong, or they both could be wrong. [But] they can’t both be right. In the case of V–A, it turned out that the experimental results were incorrect.