Producing Novelty and Securing Credibility: LHC Experiments in STS-Perspective

This project is one of six individual projects that will cooperate closely within the DFG Research Unit The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider. The Research Units main objective is to analyze the scientific practice of experiments that are currently conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva. The Research Unit forges a unique cooperation between physicists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists with the aim of collectively investigating how physicists produce knowledge in LHC experiments. The present project, which will investigate these experiments from the perspective of the social studies of science, will benefit greatly from this interdisciplinary setting. In the last decades, experiments in particle physics have undergone dramatic changes toward increasing centralization, size, and complexity. This project is motivated by the thesis that these changes have been accompanied by important changes in work organization and thus affect how, and under which conditions, physicists produce knowledge. In this context, the project raises two important questions, which are to be analyzed in detail: (1) how do scientists go about generating new results and (2) what do they do to ensure that these results are reliable and credible? In the literature, these two issues have typically been discussed separately. However, this project suggests that they are intricately connected and should thus be considered and analyzed jointly. The project involves two subprojects whose research questions and work programs will be carefully coordinated. Subproject 1 will investigate how the scientists go about their searches for new physics, especially as concerns the organization of work in collaborations of 3000 members and how they handle the complex conditions of experimentation. Subproject 2 will show how collaborations generate collectively agreed upon results and which organizational strategies they employ in this process. The project team as a whole will analyze how physicists justify their claims that novel results have (or have not) been obtained. In pursuing these objectives, the project team will use a combination of qualitative research methods, ranging from direct observation (ethnography) to qualitative interviews and document analysis. The project team consists of the two principal investigators Peter Mättig, professor of physics at the University of Wuppertal, and Martina Merz, professor of science studies at the University of Klagenfurt, a postdoctoral researcher, a doctoral student, and a student assistant.

This project is one of six projects that joined forces within the DFG/FWF Research Unit "The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider". The Research Unit's main objective is to better understand the theoretical conditions and scientific practice of experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva. In this unique cooperation, physicists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists collectively investigate how knowledge is produced in LHC experiments. Our project approaches this question from the perspective of social studies of science. In the last decades, experiments in particle physics have undergone dramatic changes toward increasing centralization, size, and complexity. We could show that these changes have significantly transformed the organization of research work and thus affected how and under which conditions physicists produce knowledge. We first explored physicists' different notions of novelty and their strategies for producing surprising and unexpected results. By closely analyzing physicists' accounts of an initially exciting effect that later turned out to be a statistical fluctuation, we found that they most value results considered 'disruptive' of current theory and practice. Similarly, we analyzed physicists' notion of creativity as a collective attribute that is explicitly considered a requirement for improving results in the future. Attending closely to physicists' practices also helped us understand how they evade the threat of circularity when undertaking specific measurements. This circularity, which has been a long-standing topic in philosophy of science, in practice is mitigated through physicists' careful evaluation of the uncertainty of their measurements. We also investigated how physicists in a research collaboration with several thousand members attend to the complexity of their organizational environment. Based on our case study and existing literature, we have identified three strategies that allow research units to simplify organizational tasks. However, we find that attending to organizational complexity is a never-ending challenge, as its reduction on one end often results in its increase on another. In addition, the strategies we have identified, such as introducing common standards and elements of bureaucratic management, generate new forms of complexity. Shifting our focus from the collective to the individual, we analyzed how this complex environment affects the work of individual researchers and, in particular, doctoral students. We found that dissertations in high-energy physics need to fulfill several distinct requirements. Notably, they need to be well-aligned with collective work but also independent and original enough to qualify for an academic title. The tension between these requirements gives rise to delicate 'alignment work' and negotiations amongst working group coordinators, Ph.D. students, and their advisers. We describe how these practices shape dissertation projects and argue that analyzing doctoral students' work helps us better understand complex research collaborations' internal dynamics.