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Nothing comes from nothing but the rho meson: The origin of the bootstrap concept in particle physics
Alexander S Blum1, Jens Salomon2
1Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany; Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Germany.
Abstract:
We present a historical and philosophical analysis of the bootstrap concept as it was first introduced in the context of particle physics by Geoffrey Chew and Stanley Mandelstam in the years 1959-1961. By providing a detailed contextual and technical analysis of the work of Chew and Mandelstam, we show that the circular causality implied by the term "bootstrap" was more than just metaphor and rhetoric, but was in fact deeply rooted in the general approach and the mathematical techniques brought to bear on the problem of high-energy scattering processes.
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