The Anvil of Practice and the Art of Experimentation

Abstract

In this chapter I shall describe how experimental physics is a labour process of making and modelling the interactions between human interventions and machine performances. I shall describe how natural mechanisms are abstracted from an interpreted cluster of the alethic possibilities of labour that are creatively extended, interpreted, and manipulated by using analogical and metaphorical connections with clusters of theories, models, machine performances, and techniques. These analogical and metaphorical associations allow mechanisms to be transferred as technological objects across the boundaries between otherwise distinct experimental machines. Each prototype is a hybrid constructed through trial and error processes of bringing together and integrating heterogeneous technological objects from other distinct kinds of machines. This provides the innovation of new machines with a sense of developmental continuity and transfactual connections between machines that share component technological objects in their construction.