There’s a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don’t know about. It’s called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive.
If you want to know the most up-to-date information on a subatomic particle, PDGLive has your back. From their home page, you can click on familiar particles like photons (
Of course, scientists don’t just accept one authoritative answer for anything, even whether Pluto is a planet. That’s why each measurement in PDGLive comes with an arrow you can expand to see a table of past measurements, which you can compare to.
Each measurement comes with a link to a source. And each source is not an experiment webpage, or some entry in a database. It’s a document, a publication, a paper.
In fact, PDGLive itself is just a website version of a paper, the Particle Data Group’s “Review of Particle Physics”. Click enough times, and you’ll find sections of a pdf on the site, explaining their reasoning for picking this experiment over that, emphasizing this or the other thing.
People talk about papers as how academics persuade one another, or how they show off and establish credit. But papers are also just a way to organize data. Each time an experiment figures something out, all of their reasoning and procedures are summarized together with the numbers they got. And anyone who reports those numbers to you will include a link, so you can go back, and check where the number came from.
It probably feels a bit weird, all of these numbers and technical details bottoming out in an archaic practice of writing down words for other human beings. But it means that all of the richness of the process is there somewhere, linked together and collated by the same social forces that keep track of credit, all in one navigable whole.
So when you run into a number, spare some thought for where it came from. You can probably find out.
4 gravitons 