http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/CDFSingleT.pdf

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

thank you for this very informative comment. Despite its mention of several physicists – I’m glad to say many of which are still in good health, and not just the deceased as poor Rich Dalitz – I will give it more visibility by pasting it as an independent post. Of course, if the involved parties have anything to say about the whole thing, they are welcome to comment…

Cheers,
T.

You and Andrea both mention the Sliwa – Goldstein – Dalitz situation
back around 1992 in which personalities got involved in controversy.

I met Richard Dalitz at a meeting in Waco, Texas, in 2002.
He told me that he had written a letter to the New Scientist expressing his concerns about the events around 1992, but that “nobody ever read it”.
When I told him that I was at least one counterexample who had read his letter, we had extensive conversation about it. He made it clear to me that he was very unhappy with the personal conflicts that had arisen, and that he felt that the conflict was primarily due to irresponsible journalism by the New Scientist writer William Bown.
Unfortunately, Richard Dalitz is now deceased. So that his views might get a wider audience, here is a copy of his letter to the New Scientist (15 August 1992, page 47) regarding the matter, captioned “Top quark”:

“With regard to William Bown’s article on the so-called discovery of a top quark (This Week, 27 June), when I spoke with him I did not claim to have found the top quark.
That is a job for an experimenter, whereas I am a theoretical physicist.
The “earlier paper” he mentions gave a speculative analysis of an event already published by the collider detector (CDF) group at Fermilab, but there was no claim that this event was due to top-antitop production and decay.
We were completely open and told Bown the current situation in this research, and even sent him copies of our three papers on top-antitop event analysis.
The CDF group at Fermilab is not blocking the publication of any paper of ours.
I should note here that we would never publish data from any group,
unless it has given us formal permission to do so or has already published it itself. We have never done so in the past, and will not do so in the future.
When Bown asked me what, supposing that a top quark were found now,
would be the effect on the Tevatron Main Injector project, I told him that this upgrading programme would then have the highest priority, since the Tevatron would be the only accelerator capable of top quark studies before the next century. His statement in the last paragraph that money spent on the Tevatron upgrade would be wasted is opposite to what I said.
Richard Dalitz
Department of theoretical physics
University of Oxford”.

I should mention that, back in 1992, I was interested in the Sliwa – Goldstein – Dalitz analysis because it seemed to support my theoretical calculation of Tquark mass.

When the book mentioned by Andrea, “The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation”, by Kent Staley, appeared, I noticed that it mentioned the Sliwa – Goldstein – Dalitz situation, and I had some e-mail correspondence with Kent Staley, who said:
“… Krys Sliwa … certainly was skeptical of the standard CDF
interpretation of the data, even after the 1995 Observation of Top
Quark paper (PRL 74(14): 2626), in particular suggesting that, even if
the top quark was contributing to the excess, there might be something
more there as well. I did not get specifics from him, however (he would
not agree to be interviewed in person, but only to answer by letter
questions that I submitted to him). …”.

I also had e-mail discussion with Krzysztof Sliwa, in which he said that he “… always felt that the “official” interpretation of the CDF top candidate
events in Run-I could be too simplistic …”.

That line of thought seems to be in the epilogue of Staley’s book, which says:
“… Sliwa struck a hopeful note with regard to just those things in the data that threaten our current understanding. Even when experimenters find that they have achieved experimenter’s success, they look more closely to see the interesting flaw in their achievement – the discrepancy that will mean, not failure necessarily, but the possibility of some new success to strive for. Just as the prelude to discovery should not be seen in terms of a monotonic preparation for the discovery that occurs, so the aftermath of discovery should not be seen as the straightforward unfolding of the consequences of the knowledge thus gained. CDF and D-zero went to great lengths to establish that they now know some things about the world that were previously unknown. Just as important is the probing of this new realm of information to find out just what it is that we do not yet know. …”.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

As for your aborted early branching into experimental physics, well, we seem to have so many skilled experimentalists around and so few free thinking theoreticians, that I am glad you populate the latter.

Cheers,
T.

As for Tony, I am grateful of his own bookkeeping about the top history. Somehow I was in my own ivory tower -or cellar- between computers and theoretists and I missed all the developments. Had I known better back in 1990, I could have though aboing doing the doctorate in some of the experimentalist groups (on other hand, I was told they were afraid whenever I was near a cryostat in the ILL neutron beam).

I am not in the position to comment meaningfully on whether the ideas of Tony are solid or not, but I indeed find the whole thing stimulating, and will keep posting on it here.

Cheers,
T.

I did not want to name names… Of course I know the names -I was there in 1992- but since you started, here is it. Back then, Krisztof Sliwa analyzed the ttbar candidate by CDF in the dileptonic final state with an analysis called “neutrino weighting technique” which has later become a standard, and worked with Dalitz and Goldstein on a paper which was not authorized by the CDF collaboration…

I will look at the paper if I have some time, thank you for pointing it out.

Cheers,
T.