Why Trust Physics? The Discovery and Acceptance of Quarks, 1968-1979

In her 2019 book, Why Trust Science?, Harvard University historian of science Naomi Oreskes argues that the credibility of a scientific result or theory is established largely through a complex social process in which a skeptical, diverse scientific community reaches consensus on a subject — for her, anthropogenic climate change. I examine this proposition in the context of the discovery of quarks during the 1970s and their acceptance by essentially the entire physics community by the end of that decade, a topic about which I wrote in my 1987 book, The Hunting of the Quark. In so doing, I address the social constructivist picture of this process, and the nature and role of scientific consensus in establishing the “reality” of a new “object.”