"Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist"
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Bothe is doing something scientists rarely admit theyre doing: lobbying for a technique. The coincidence method sounds like a dry bit of apparatus logic, but in the 1920s and 30s it was a conceptual weapon - a way to make an unruly, probabilistic world submit to clean, defensible claims. Nuclear physics was (and is) a discipline haunted by noise: random decays, spurious counts, cosmic rays, detector quirks. Coincidence counting answers that mess with a simple demand: dont trust a single signal; trust two independent ones that arrive together. Its an epistemology disguised as circuitry.
The phrase "without exaggeration" is the tell. Bothe knows how grand "essential tool" sounds, and he preemptively inoculates against the charge of salesman hyperbole. The subtext is institutional: modern nuclear physics is defined not just by big ideas about nuclei, but by the ability to discriminate events, tag particles, and prove causality in a sea of statistical accidents. Coincidence techniques made it possible to say, with a straight face, that an observed track or pulse corresponded to a real physical process and not the instruments imagination.
Context matters: Bothe helped pioneer this method and, by extension, helped shift the field from speculative models to instrument-driven certainty. The line stakes a claim about what "modern" means in physics: not merely new theories, but new filters for reality. In a field where you cant see your subject, credibility is engineered.
The phrase "without exaggeration" is the tell. Bothe knows how grand "essential tool" sounds, and he preemptively inoculates against the charge of salesman hyperbole. The subtext is institutional: modern nuclear physics is defined not just by big ideas about nuclei, but by the ability to discriminate events, tag particles, and prove causality in a sea of statistical accidents. Coincidence techniques made it possible to say, with a straight face, that an observed track or pulse corresponded to a real physical process and not the instruments imagination.
Context matters: Bothe helped pioneer this method and, by extension, helped shift the field from speculative models to instrument-driven certainty. The line stakes a claim about what "modern" means in physics: not merely new theories, but new filters for reality. In a field where you cant see your subject, credibility is engineered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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