Rochester Roundabout: Story of High Energy Physics

This collection of papers resulted from a series of Rochester Conferences, the international state-of-the-art reviews, occuring initially yearly and later at two-year intervals. Their proceedings particularly in the earlier years provide a more informal and consequently a more realistic account of how physicists think. The author, a theorist, endeavoured to acknowledge appropriately the immense importance of experimental ingenuity and persistence in the development of high-energy physics, though it is a theorist's eye view which is given here. Each Rochester conference is given its own chapter the first introducing the state of the art in high energy physics as it existed in 1950 and the last uses the preceding story as a test case for the evaluation of ideas and claims in the philosophy of science.