27 October 2020
The main goal of my research is to examine the history of modern physics within the context of Big Science, not just through the lens of theory as it is so often presented, but also through the materialities and the experimental practices involved. Thus, I investigate to what extent the material culture of CERN, and more specifically the colliders and the detectors, which are the vital instruments of the laboratory, have determined the research paths of High Energy Physics (HEP). More specifically, enormous experimental structures, such as the colliders LEP (Large Electron–Positron) and LHC (Large Hadron Collider), are projects that owing to complexity, costs and the difficulties involved in managing them, demand quite long design periods, and a particular negotiation strategy at both the sociopolitical as well as the scientific level for their realization. Hence, more often than not, these colliders are not mere instruments called upon to validate a theory, but, having an enormous social, political, diplomatic, geopolitical and financial dynamic, they largely define how an entire branch of the physical sciences is going to
develop. In order to highlight the aforementioned aspects of the contemporary laboratory, I focus on three case studies: the abrupt shutdown of the LEP in 2000 despite indications that it was nearing the ‘Holy Grail’ discovery of the Higgs, the designing of the LHC as an exploratory machine and the planning of the Future Colliders at present. The study described above is based on an ongoing field research at CERN, which includes an extensive research into CERN's Archive (including specific, restricted access archives which have not been used historiographically in the past) and interviews with physicists who have played a major role in CERN’s history.
Grigoris Panoutsopoulos is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Thesis Title: The Scientific laboratory from 20th to 21th Century: The Case of CERN. Supervisors: Professors Kostas Gavroglu and Theodore Arabatzis