Producing Novelty & Securing Credibility in LHC Experiments

This project is one of six individual projects that cooperate closely within the DFG Research Unit The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider, established in 2016. The Research Units main objective is to analyse the scientific practice of experiments that are currently conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva. The Research Unit has forged a unique cooperation between physi cists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists with the aim of collectively investigating how physicists produce knowledge in LHC experiments. The present project, which investigates these experiments from the perspective of social studies of science, is benefiting greatly from this interdisciplinary setting. In the last decades, experiments in particle physics have undergone dramatic changes toward increasing centralisation, size, and complexity. This project is motivated by the thesis that these changes have induced important changes in work organisation and thus affect how, and under which conditions, physicists produce knowledge. In this context, the project raises two important questions: (1) how do scientists go about generating new results and (2) what do they do to ensure that these results are reliable and credible? During the first three years of research (phase 1), the project has explored physicists different notions of novelty, and their strategies for producing surprising and unexpec ted results. It has also analysed how individual researchers gain credibility and recognition in research collaborations with more than 3000 members. During the second three -year period of research (phase 2), the project will focus on the role of technical instruments and creativity in generating new results. It will continue to analyse the strategies that the collaborations employ in order to generate collectively agreed upon results, despite the high level of specialisation of the different groups within the collaborations. One example for such a strategy, that will be analysed in detail, are collectively organised internal review processes, where the collaboration makes sure that all results are both new and well justified. In pursuing these objectives, t he project team will use a combination of qualitative methods, in particular interviews and document analysis. Beyond its expected contributions to better understand the specific case of experiments at the LHC, the projects results more generally promise new insights into the internal dynamics of extremely complex organisations.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is one of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever constructed. Experiments at the LHC are conducted by multi-institutional and multi-national research collaborations with several thousand members. This project investigated how these collaborations and their members search for new physics and secure credibility for results under these complex conditions. Drawing upon perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we employed qualitative empirical approaches, primarily conducting in-depth interviews and analyzing documents. Our first focus was the inherent organizational complexity of large research collaborations, based on the understanding that knowledge production requires practical coordination across multiple levels and units of collaboration. As a result of a literature review and our empirical case study, we identified three strategies of how collaborations manage organizational complexity: segmenting research infrastructure, introducing elements of bureaucratic governance, and implementing standards and standardization. Based on the thesis that collaborations have to reconcile collective and individual needs to enable the generation of reliable knowledge, we investigated how the quality of individual contributions is secured. In the case of doctoral dissertations, these contributions need to be well integrated in collective projects, yet convincing as standalone research accomplishments. Drawing on interviews with Ph.D. students and their advisors, we describe two kinds of 'alignment work' required to construct doable dissertations in such complex research settings. Further developing this focus on how individual contributions and credibility are established in large research collectives, we analyzed an ongoing debate in high-energy physics on how the recognition of individuals and their contributions might be improved. We show that the ATLAS collaboration strategically mobilizes different forms of recognition to sustain the collective mode of work, and to foster a sense of community among its members. Our interest in how credibility is secured also led us to focus on evaluation practices in LHC collaborations in the context of technical review. Observing the upgrade work during the latest long shutdown of the LHC, we identified trade-offs between continuation and innovation negotiated in the process of technical review. We show that technology development and construction are central to achieving particle physics' epistemic goals. Based on these insights, we argue that quality control practices can inform the broader debate on value and error management in science by detailing how values such as safety, speed, and precision are collaboratively negotiated and enacted in the process of technical review. As one of six projects of the DFG/FWF Research Unit "The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider", the project benefited greatly from the unique cooperation between physicists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists, and from the collective investigation of how physicists produce knowledge in LHC experiments.