I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; the insistent hiss of venting nitrogen gas from the liquifiers of a bubble chamber; the resounding crack of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and leaving the lab stinking of ozone; the silent, darkened room, with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected bubble chamber images; the late-night computer screens flashing with the skeined complexity of rotating and disappearing tracks; the one remaining iridescent purple line cutting across the background of a terminal. Pictures and pulses—I want to know where they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line data of physics.
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics
