By 1933, the class of generally accepted elementary particles comprised the electron, the photon, the proton as well as newcomers in the shape of the neutron, the positron, and the neutrino. During the following decade, a new and poorly understood particle, the mesotron or meson, was added to the list. By paying close attention to the names of these and other particles and to the sometimes controversial proposals of names, a novel perspective on this well-researched line of development is offered. (...) Part of the study investigates the circumstances around the coining of “positron” as an alternative to “positive electron.” Another and central part is concerned with the many names associated with the discovery of what in the late 1930s was generally called the “mesotron” but eventually became known as the “meson” and later again the muon and pion. The naming of particles in the period up to the early 1950s was more than just a matter of agreeing on convenient terms, it also reflected different conceptions of the particles and in some cases the uncertainty regarding their nature and relations to existing theories. Was the particle discovered in the cosmic rays the same as the one responsible for the nuclear forces? While two different names might just be synonymous referents, they might also refer to widely different conceptual images. (shrink)

I argue that although Ockham’s Razor (OR) has its origins in a-priorist ontological mandates according to the purposes of natural theology and natural philosophy as influenced by it, the principle has taken on significant empirical and contingent materialist connotations and conceptual content since the scientific revolution. I briefly discuss the pluralism of the concept of OR historically and in contemporary science and philosophy. I then attempt to align scientific metaphysics with contemporary conceptions of OR, and to demonstrate that ontic parsimony (...) is an indispensable element of scientific (contingent and anti-a-priorist) metaphysics. I then further deploy that scientific metaphysics to propose a contingently grounded semi-formal approach, with set theoretic features, and then with information theoretic features, to provide a way of assessing when a scientific theory and its ontology are aligned with OR appropriately in the context of the proposed scientific metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how scientists determine which type of hypothesis is most suitable for tackling a particular problem by examining the historical case of the anomalous β spectrum in early nuclear physics, a puzzle that occasioned the most diverse hypotheses amongst physicists at the time. It is shown that such determinations are most often implicitly informed by scientists' individual perspectives on the structural relations between the various elements of the theory and the problem at hand. In addition (...) to this main result, it is suggested that Wolfgang Pauli's neutrino idea may well have been an adaptation of Ernst Rutherford's original and older neutron idea, which would provide evidence that the adaptation of older ideas is a more common practice than is often thought. (shrink)