Unfinished nature : particle physics at CERN / Arpita Roy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"In Unfinished Nature, Arpita Roy offers an ethnographic account of a sophisticated particle physics laboratory to distinguish the modes of reasoning that animate discoveries and innovations, which is decisive for the way in which an experimental science understands itself in its relation to the contemporary world. She draws on two and half years of ethnographic fieldwork from the site of the world's highest energy experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, or the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, near Geneva in Switzerland. Roy was on site during the climactic discovery of the Higgs boson, which won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics, to tell the parallel stories of what scientists have to say about their commitments and concerns, the sources and vision guiding their experiments, and the questions they ask of themselves and of us. In doing so, she raises questions about how we think about the discovery of scientific knowledge and reflects self-consciously about how we should think about the social context of scientific discoveries. Unfinished Nature examines how discoveries and innovations in experimental sciences constitute a break from a social context. Central to her understanding is that discovering new facts in experimental physics-from quarks to positrons-turns on conceptual issues rather than on questions of empirical support and constitute, which she calls a living ontology. In doing so, Roy shows how scientists at the highest level of abstraction think about and understand the work that they do and how it is possible at all."-- Provided by publisher.