Abstract
A physics laboratory is often seen as ‘the place where an experiment is carried out’. But what is a laboratory in theoretical physics or, more generally, in a theoretical science? Is it the desk, the office, the cafeteria, the institute’s building? Not really — let’s transform the definition above into ‘the place where something happens’. Practices make ‘something happen‘, they guide to the ‘place where’. Theoretical physicists ‘closely’ cooperate often with colleagues physically ‘far away’. This cooperation will be described in the following as ‘disembedded collaborations’, and the way these collaborations operate will lead us to their spaces: the physical one and the electronic one.
SPACE — A logical conceptual form (or structure) serving as a medium in which other forms and some structures are realized. (Encyclopaedia of Mathematics)
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Notes
The ethnographic methods employed are direct observation and ethnographic interviews. In addition, e-mails exchanged between collaborating physicists are collected and analysed.
See Knorr Cetina and Mulkay (1983) and Knorr Cetina (1995) for reviews of laboratory studies.
To be more precise, the topology describes those properties of shapes and figures which remain invariant under certain transformations, as bending or stretching.
See Ophir and Shapin (1991) for a ‘methodological survey’ of research on spatial settings and their relation to the production of knowledge. See Mol and Law (1994) for a discussion of several kinds of space inspired by the notion of ‘topology’ in mathematics.
A more detailed account of the ontology of theoretical objects will be given in a subsequent paper.
The working days are of course also structured by other events, such as colleagues knocking at the door, lunch and coffee breaks, seminar talks, etc.
‘Theory Division’ will each time refer to the Theoretical Studies Division of CERN.
The situation varies from country to country but the trend seems to be universal.
Nuclear Physics B is one of the major journals in which particle theorists publish. An analysis of all issues between 1980 and today would provide a more exact picture about the dynamics of the increase of disembedded collaborations. This analysis will be presented in a subsequent paper.
This does not hold for all particle theorists: some collaborate with the same colleagues over a long stretch of time up to several years, some are involved in a long-term oroiect which can be defined long in advance.
Access to the Theory Division is considered a valuable good. Time spent at CERN as a research fellow or a staff member constitutes an important asset in a young theorist’s curriculum vitae. In the competition on the job market but also in the struggle for recognition CERN is occupied as a territory.
CERN is not the only research centre in which theoretical particle physicists gather. Further examples are DESY (Hamburg, FRG), ICTP (Trieste, Italy), Nordita (Copenhagen, Denmark) in Europe; SLAC (near San Francisco), Fermilab (near Chicago), ITP (Santa Barbara) and IAS (Princeton) in the US. Some centres of theoretical research coexist with experimental sites, near the accelerators and detectors of high energy physics experiments (e.g. CERN). Others are devoted entirely to theoretical physics research (e.g. ICTP). The centres typically provide financial support, a desk and computer facilities to visitors (the number varies from centre to centre), staying various periods of time ranging from a couple of days to one or two vears.
Among the theoretical physicists at CERN 18 per cent are staff members; 52 per cent are fellows, postdocs or other visitors staying one to two (occasionally three) years; 22 per cent are visitors staying from one to eight months (very often senior scientists on leave of absence or sabbatical leave); and 8 per cent are PhD students staying variable periods of time. The numbers are approximate only. They refer to April 1995. In the summer, the percentage of short-term visitors increases clearly.
Theoretical physicists perform many different tasks with the help of computers. In addition to the above mentioned, computers are used for numerical or symbolic computations and for text processing.
Theorists often refer to the relevant e-print archives as ‘the bulletin board’. Ginsparg (1994), however, emphasizes the difference between the ‘formal communication’ — the exchange of abstracts and research papers — provided by an e-print archive and the ‘informal (and unarchived) communication’ provided by electronic bulletin boards.
For comparison with other fields, see Walsh and Bayma (forthcoming) who discuss the incorporation of computer mediated communication across mathematics, chemistry, biology and (mostly experimental) physics, and Lewenstein (1995) who discusses the electronic bulletin boards active during the ‘cold fusion saga’.
How the collaborative practices between theorists who never met face to face differ from those of collaborations rooted in face to face contact is up to now an unresolved issue but will be studied in the future.
The concept of a reconfiguration of the social and natural order in a laboratory is developed by Knorr Cetina (1992) and applied to the case of experimental particle physics (Knorr Cetina, 1996).
An exception are e-mails sent out to spread information widely, as for example conference announcements.
An element of informality pertains to practices of e-mail exchange as well, but it occurs on a different level: e-mail ‘letters’ are most often written in a casual style, mixing elements of written and spoken language.
One may contrast this observation with Wulf’s ‘vision’ of ‘a center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location’ (Wulf, 1993), a centre which Wulf calls a ‘collaboratory’.
See Knorr Cetina (1995: 156–7) for an overview and references.
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Merz, M. (1998). ‘Nobody Can Force You When You Are Across the Ocean’ — Face to Face and E-Mail Exchanges Between Theoretical Physicists. In: Smith, C., Agar, J. (eds) Making Space for Science. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26324-0_14
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