Beamtimes+and+lifetimes

Science Studies Annotation for Sharon Traweek, //Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists.// Grant Otsuki 2006/2/21

“This book is not about how physicists have shaped our world, or why our society has given them power and prestige. Nor is it about the current state of knowledge and inquiry in high energy physics. Instead it is an account of how high energy physicists see their own world; how they have forged a research community for themselves, how they turn novices into physicists, and how their community works to produce knowledge.” (1) “Detectors express diverse styles of research, different strategies for success. Above all, they embody rules for separating noise, which arises from imperfections in the experimental process, from data, which carry authentic messages from nature; nevertheless, detectors ideally become invisible, transparent scientific instruments for reading news from nature. I see detectors as the material embodiment of the high energy physics culture. They display the tension inherent in the physicists’ different experiences and ideas about time and they also provide a model for the resolution of that tension.” (158) “Their everyday anxieties about the terrible loss of time – terrors that are carefully maintained in the culture of physics, as if they were essential driving forces for the good physicists – seem to me a mirror image of the cosmological vision that transcends change and mortality.” (17) “Two recurring themes in my account are gender and national culture. […] The lab is a man’s world, and I try to show why that is particularly the case in high energy physics: how the practice of physics is engendered, how laboratory work is masculinized. […] Their [the Japanese] efforts to establish KEK, and to bring its equipment to world standards and keep it there, are part of the larger goal of moving Japan from the periphery to the core of the international community. I have tried to understand how their strategies for this campaign are related to Japanese research traditions.” (16-17) Traweek makes several parallel arguments in this book. First, she argues that physicists work within a tension between two notions of time, which pushes them in their research. She distinguishes between ‘relativistic time’ and ‘non relativistic, experiential time’. The former is the domain of particle interactions which are the subject of the physicists’ research, while the latter is the dimension in which human life and experience unfolds. The physicists exist at the intersection of these two domains, forced to contend with the ‘beam time’ of research and the ‘life time’ of bureaucracy, gossip, relationships, and personal and professional endeavor and conflict. These run parallel to other binaries she configures: priority of discovery versus caution in publication, personal ambition and self-promotion versus harmony of the group, theorist versus experimenter, nature versus human, signal versus noise, idealized objectivity versus vulgar subjectivity, science versus society, Japanese versus American. In each of these, and other cases, her subjects are rarely one or the other, but seem to exist at some indeterminate place in between the two. Traweek finds their greatest stabilization and clearest expression in the detectors around which every research team is centred. For Traweek, the detectors are material embodiments of the concerns of the cultures that produce them. The second half of the book contains further investigations into these cultures. In chapter 3, she addresses the stereotypes in and genderedness of the normalization process for new physicists, and the masculine bent in the rhetoric used by the community, and how lifetimes are in tension with beamtimes in the career of a physicist from undergrad to statesman. In chapter 4, she identifies several stable distinctions made by physicists which arise out of an analysis of their practices. In chapter 5, Traweek looks at how physicists in the US and Japan integrate change into a system which members want to see in a stable ground state. Through these arguments, Traweek hopes to further open up the kinds of subjects that ethnographic research can approach, beyond the traditionally and conventionally ‘strange’ or ‘foreign.’ In chapter 2, Traweek describes a kind of totemic ritual, where the physicists at SLAC gather for the passing of an old detector. This begins a description of the detector which reveals the tinkering the physicists performed to adapt the detector for new uses, the military state which contributed materials to its construction, and the commercial suppliers required for cameras. The group members’ pride in the ingenious thrift in parts, time, and effort, reveals parts of the ethos of the community. (54) Later in the same chapter, the description and comparison of Japanese and American detectors shows how the differences in bureaucratic structure, financial resources, and organizational philosophy between the two countries manifest themselves in the design of detectors. For example, the components of a Japanese detector are built by contracted companies according to specifications provided by physicists. Traweek connects this to government policy which sees investment in detector experiments as a way to indirectly spur innovation in private corporations. (69) In a part of her account which mixes gender and culture with the reflexive element of her study, Traweek describes her own surprise at the KEK researchers’ lack of surprise to what she believed would be non-traditional female activity, and non-Japanese appearance and attitude. (43) This illustrates the stratification that occurs among different types of physicists which she returns to nearer to the end of the book, and is an example of a finding made possible by her research methods – participant observation – she mentions at the beginning. Throughout the book, Traweek makes reference to several classical and contemporary thinkers. Weber enters in her classification of different types of leadership as authoritarian and charismatic (65), as well as in her discussion of oral communication, where Merton also appears. She argues against their internalist perspectives on science, and their understanding of decision-making within science as objective and neutral. (117) Much of her discussion in the last half of the book might also be read as a reaction to Mertonian sociology of science, and similar rationalist (?) accounts of scientific practice. It is clear that Traweek finds that such norms, if they exist, are articulated and revealed by practice, and are not prior to it, and that they are culturally specific and subject to change. This might also connect Traweek to Polanyi. Traweek’s analysis, although it finds connections between the HEP community and the outside, shows how the physicists see themselves in a kind of state within a state. But in contrast to Polanyi, she finds the physicists actively policing the boundary between themselves and the outside world. In addition, Traweek uses the notion of tacit knowledge as facilitating exclusion of certain groups to experimental equipment. Latour and Woolgar also appear in several locations. Traweek compares her own findings to those in their //Laboratory Life//, and appears to arrive at similar conclusions, although she replaces their focus on text and inscription with a similar one on the artifacts of experiment. Networks also appear here as a unit of analysis, which might suggest the influence of early actor-network approaches. (Depending on how developed ANT was in Laboratory Life, and during the writing of this book.) The book also seems to draw on a large body of sociological and anthropological work on Japan. She cites Ruth Benedict’s //Chrysanthemum and the Sword//, which is taken by many to be the first and one of the most influential texts on Japanese society. Traweek does not use her findings to challenge established views of Japanese society, but references texts to contextualize and deepen her ethnographic analysis. [Although never mentioned specifically, there are several indications of post-structuralist influences on her work.] Some of her descriptions of experimental apparatuses and their functioning seem to be of the kind that Rheinberger’s later descriptions of biological experiment are reacting against. The focus in the book on the detector relates to STS’s attention to technological artifacts in general, and scientific instruments in particular. One can understand through this book another way in which artifacts might be said to have politics. The detectors, once built, encourage a certain approach to HEP research which reflects a certain arrangement of power. Subatomic particles themselves can have politics, as in the J/psi particle example (65). However, her characterization of the development processes and her positioning of the detectors more often as a rallying point or end point of social processes puts her more in line with the SCOT tradition. One can see the ways in which she maps out relevant groups, and shows how their diverse interests contend and appear within the final artifact. So it might be said that this book is involved in ongoing debates regarding the development of technological artifacts in STS. The gendering of scientific practice is also prominent in this book. Traweek describes how women are marginalized to work in non-academic, mid or low level jobs, and the gendered metaphors used by scientists and scientific texts to describe research and experiment. This book may be useful for my research on two levels. This book may contain some of the clearest statements I have found on participant-observation, the work of the ethnographer, and how to perform good anthropological work. This and the depth and dedication apparent in the main body of the book will be important for any kind of ethnographic study I might attempt. Traweek shows that it is a very fine line between participation and observation that the ethnographer must walk along, stepping from one side to the other as is appropriate and needed. The book is also a valuable source for whatever research I do on academic publishing. Her section on oral and written communication, and the publishing and reading habits of physicists will figure in the questions that I decide to ask, and the communities I look at. Critically examine how various authors have articulated connections between science and culture writ large. It could be said that Traweek sees the HEP community as a kind of distorting mirror. In some cases, in it can be seen images bearing some features of representations found in the ‘host culture.’ For example, the marginalization of women in physics parallels that found in society. In other cases, the images received are magnified and reflected back. The stereotypical image of the physicist as the one at the top of the hierarchy of human knowledge, of the lone genius male working in isolate from culture, these are useful fictions that the scientific community exploits and extends. The scientific community, based on the norms and systems of distinction that have arisen within it, selectively interprets, integrates, and exports parts of culture from the outside. These all contribute to a sense of ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ within the community. Something which she never explicitly states, but is present throughout, is the notion that despite the way she initially sees her subjects as anthropologically ‘strange’, Traweek understands that they lead a kind of double life, one as physicists, which she writes about extensively, and the other as an ‘ordinary person’ living within the larger culture. In some ways, her study is of what scientists ‘forget to leave at the door’ when they walk into their labs. The most interesting examples of this idea are her treatments of gender, and Japanese culture. At one point, discussing the attitude of physicists’ wives toward their husbands work relative to their own, Traweek shows how the ‘higher calling’ rhetoric surrounding particle physics and other kinds of fundamental physics research has become internalized within some of the wives. This joins with gendered notions of scientific work and the stereotypical scientist to create situations in which women choose not to pursue their own careers.
 * 1) What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?
 * 1) What is the main argument of the text?
 * 1) Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.
 * 1) Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to.
 * 1) Describe at least three of the text’s themes or topics that are of general interest in STS.
 * 1) Explain how this book could inform your research.
 * 1) Using this text, draft a partial response to the weekly discussion question.