Elementary particles; discovered or constructed

This chapter criticizes the ''discovery'' theory which states that the world is composed of quarks, leptons and vector bosons, and particle physicists are passive observers who simply report the fact of the existence of these particles to the public; suggests that it makes more sense to see the world of quarks, gluons, etc., as having been actively constructed by scientists; presents historical examples to demonstrate that theories select data just as much as data select theories: It may have been the SLAC experiment which convinced particle physicists that the Weinberg-Salam model was right, but it was the Weinberg-Salam model which convinced them that the Washington-Oxford experiments were wrong; recommends that the idea that scientists are the passive discoverers of the unproblematic facts of nature be replaced with an alternative view that instead they actively construct their world by recycling old theories in an ecologically desirable way, and searching out processes and interpreting data on them within the theoretical contexts thus constructed