Finding as Tracing: A Perspective from Particle Physics

Nurida Boddenberg

Science often speaks of “finding” entities and phenomena as if it marked the successful end of a search, “Higgs boson found”, sometimes using the term interchangeably with “discovering.” Yet this usage reduces finding to the achievement of a desired result, thereby neglecting the epistemic work involved in the collection, combination, and stabilisation of evidence. This evidential labour exceeds the framework of a mere search and does not always culminate in a significant or canonised discovery. This talk offers a case-based perspective from experimental particle physics and proposes to understand scientific finding as a form of tracing.

In experiments such as ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider, most particles and processes are not directly observed. Instead, physicists identify characteristic patterns in complex data sets generated by different detector components across multiple runs and in different experiments. These patterns can be understood as signatures: structured configurations in the data that function as epistemic objects in their own right, while simultaneously serving as traces of underlying physical processes (Roy 2014; Mättig & Stöltzner 2020; Boddenberg 2023). Scientific finding consists in stabilising such signatures across background noise, modelling assumptions, and varying experimental conditions --what I call multiple access robustness – and in integrating overlapping signatures into a coherent evidential network.

Finding, understood as tracing, does not canonise a single interpretation. Rather, it establishes a stabilised evidential structure that acquires epistemic weight by gradually gaining support over competing networks of patterns. The 750 GeV diphoton excess illustrates how such a tracing process can begin and generate provisional evidential coherence without ever consolidating into a discovery.