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Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists
Abstract
The unique breed of particle physicists constitutes a community of sophisticated mythmakers--explicators of the nature of matter who forever alter our views of space and time. But who are these people? What is their world really like? Sharon Traweek, a bold and original observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674063488
... It is true that some scientific domains have experienced an increase in the number of authors per publication making it impossible to discern the nature and extent of individual contributions to a publication [12]. A striking example of this phenomenon can be found in the domain of high-energy physics where author lists for a single publication often include tens or even hundreds of authoring researchers [37]. For this reason, a number of recent studies of physics collaboration supplement traditional analytic techniques with more qualitative methods of survey research, i.e., directly asking authors to indicate the real nature of their contributions to a publication [35,3]. ...
Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often rely on a wealth of bibliographic data, but very little or no other information about the individuals in the network, and thus, fail to illustrate the broader social and academic landscape in which collaboration takes place. In this article, we perform an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a relatively small network of scientific collaboration (N = 291) constructed from the bibliographic record of a research center involved in the development and application of sensor network and wireless technologies. We perform a preliminary analysis of selected structural properties of the network, computing its range, configuration and topology. We then support our preliminary statistical analysis with an in-depth temporal investigation of the assortative mixing of selected node characteristics, unveiling the researchers' propensity to collaborate preferentially with others with a similar academic profile. Our qualitative analysis of mixing patterns offers clues as to the nature of the scientific community being modeled in relation to its organizational, disciplinary, institutional, and international arrangements of collaboration.
... The field of experimental high-energy physics is dominated by a relatively small number of large, highlyvisible projects. High-energy physics projects frequently have long lifetimes -projects lasting 3-5 years or even longer are typical (Traweek, 1992). Major high-energy physics experiments are carried out by large, multiinstitutional collaborations, sometimes with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. ...
The shift towards the use of electronic media in scholarly communication appears to be an inescapable imperative. However, these shifts are uneven, both with respect to field and with respect to the form of communication. Different scientific fields have developed and use distinctly different communicative forums, both in the paper and electronic arenas, and these forums play different communicative roles within the field. One common claim is that we are in the early stages of an electronic revolution, that it is only a matter of time before other fields catch up with the early adopters, and that all fields converge on a stable set of electronic forums. A social shaping of technology (SST) perspective helps us to identify important social forces centered around disciplinary constructions of trust and of legitimate communication that pull against convergence. This analysis concludes that communicative plurality and communicative heterogeneity are durable features of the scholarly landscape, and that we are likely to see field differences in the use of and meaning ascribed to communications forums persist, even as overall use of electronic communications technologies both in science and in society as a whole increases.
... 22 LSRIs share this characteristic but at a much larger scale. Issues around complexity in LSRIs have been examined by Kaufmann et al. 5 and in the context of a major scientific laboratory by Whyte et al. 23 LSRIs are also socially complex with global collaborations and communities linked to them; Traweek 24 and Zabusky 25 conducted notable ethnographies into high energy physicists and space scientists respectively. However, it must be noted that in both cases the unit of analysis was the laboratory rather than the apparatus which is the primary focus of this article. ...
This article reviews ‘large-scale research infrastructures’ work and other relevant literature from the science policy and management domains. Through a systematic literature review, the study identifies that there are no firm inclusion or exclusion criteria for a large-scale research infrastructure. The findings identify the need for filling this knowledge gap to support future analyses for large-scale research infrastructures to help scientists and science policymakers understand, plan, and evaluate their own work. A refined version of one of the concepts examined in this article, the ‘large international science project’, provides the most fruitful starting point.
Gender issues persist in the computing industry, with women representing only just over 20 percent of the workforce, despite numerous initiatives to encourage their wider participation. This paper explores gender inequalities within the computing industry by adapting the sociological lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus and field to understand why inequalities arise and persist in the computing industry. Using interviews with both men and women in the computing industry, the research explores the gender perceptions and systemic experiences from both perspectives. The findings indicate that while inequalities persist, women can and do demonstrate agency in creating their own social support networks to assist in negotiating the male dominated workplace. Promisingly, there is also an increasing awareness among men in the industry regarding the importance of inclusivity, coupled with the positive impact of such developments for them personally.
The COVID-19 pandemic had numerous consequences in the Brazilian context. Markedly unequal, people lived in different ways in this continental country and along with this some quick solutions appeared, mainly in speeches by public figures such as the former president of the republic and other health professionals. Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Nitazoxamide or Annita, all medicines included in the Kit-COVID, were some of the immediate bets in response to the context of the global health crisis. Since then, a series of debates about forms of treatment and dealing with a pandemic have been published in the newspapers, creating an infodemic scenario. This was characterized by a profusion of messages, scientific discoveries monitored in real time and new findings about an unknown illness. Instigated by these events, I began an investigation via 3 newspapers and news: CNN Brasil, Folha de São Paulo e Jornal Matinal, with the aim of better understanding the magical solutions represented by medicines, based on Toniol (2020), and its consequences in the Brazilian context. This work was splitted into three stages: a documentary stage, which consists of news analysis and two field trips, which consists of interviews carried out with scientists. From reading and systematizing news from media outlets, I understand that there is a certain appropriation of narratives within the sciences and their dissemination in these media. Furthermore, monitoring scientific findings at different times gave rise to more or less credibility for new treatments for COVID-19. At first, in March 2020, Hydroxychloroquine revealed itself as having potential for treating the disease, but as of June of the same year, the suspicion was not confirmed and became “proven ineffective”. In this sense, the scientific field could respond to the productions and reproductions of these statements. Curious about the possibility of reflecting on the scientific manufacture of the Kit-COVID medicines within the space of the scientists who researched the substances. In total, I carried out 28 interviews with 26 different researchers between September 2022 and February 2023. Most of them were located in the southeast of the country, due to the large record of research via Plataforma Brasil of experiments coordinated by scientists from this region. The researchers reflected on the loopholes in the regulation of experiments with medicines already on the market, the relationship between science and politics and the conduct of some health professionals in their clinics. There is a set of factors that cause a medicine to be advertised and thus pose a risk to public health, which was early involved in a sequence of medical prescriptions for substances still undergoing scientific experimentation.
It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge by manipulating how questions of risk are framed. Yet courts can and must evaluate these risks. In this chapter, I suggest modes of qualitative reasoning to facilitate such evaluation.
Faculty members play a crucial role as change agents in promoting cultural transformation within academic environments and empathy, a fundamental component of effective teaching, mentoring, and collegiality, is essential for fostering a student-centered and holistic approach. We present a theoretical model for empathy development and navigation in physics faculty as they engage with students and colleagues. Two pathways—cognitive and affective—are connected with previous work and explored. Cognitive empathy, a slower, intellectual process, is mediated through reflective witnessing, whereas affective empathy, a faster, emotional process, builds on shared or adjacent lived experiences. Understanding the nuances associated with the different pathways can inform efforts to increase participation and foster an inclusive environment, which often presumes a meaningful understanding of what best supports individual students.
Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Frontier scientific discoveries increasingly rely on big-science research infrastructures, such as supercolliders, synchrotron light sources, and space telescopes, whose construction and operation involve intensive international collaboration. This collaborative nature, however, presents a challenge in balancing national interests with the common good, particularly given the substantial fiscal investments involved. This study investigates the effects of one of China’s prominent big-science infrastructures, the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), on the country’s production of science, differentiating between national and international scientific endeavors. Employing a rigorous difference-in-differences (DID) methodology, it evaluates SSRF’s effects on discipline-level production of publications by domestic researchers and those involving international collaboration. The empirical findings reveal compelling evidence that SSRF has significantly enhanced the production of high-impact national and international publications for disciplines reliant on the facility for experiments, particularly increasing the percentage of high-impact national publications. The findings also underscore the dual role of big-science infrastructures in fostering international research collaboration while simultaneously enhancing nations’ domestic scientific development and competitiveness. Additionally, the study provides valuable insights for research assessment and science policy discussions.
In this article, we analyze the productive role of aesthetics in organizing technoscientific work. Specifically, we investigate how aesthetic judgments form and inform code-writing practices at a large web services company in Russia. We focus on how programmers express aesthetic judgments about code and software design in everyday practice and explore how language with positive and negative valences is deployed. We find that programmers label code as “beautiful” without defining or establishing agreement about the term and are thereby able to maintain different ideals of beauty within the same organization. However, by learning how to avoid what senior developers deem to be “ugly” code, developers become socialized into producing code with a similar style and logic that we describe as “not ugly.” The fieldwork suggests that aesthetic language can function simultaneously as a mechanism that supports professional diversity within an organization and as a tool for producing consistencies in software design. Studying manifestations of both positive and negative aesthetic language in technoscientific work provides insight into professional practices and the various roles aesthetic language can play in organizational life.
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