Anthropology: Watching physicists work
MAR 25, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024188
Nature News : “I am here to watch you.” So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world’s biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and—possibly—to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
