Projektbeschreibung
Neues Wissen erlangen: Zusammenarbeit im Bereich der Teilchenphysik
Wir wird neues Wissen in modernen, weitreichenden Forschungszusammenschlüssen erzeugt und validiert? Diese Frage soll das EU-finanzierte Projekt NEPI beantworten. Dafür kommen modernste Instrumente aus den digitalen Geisteswissenschaften zum Einsatz. Im Mittelpunkt der Forschung steht die ATLAS-Kollaboration am Labor für Teilchenphysik des CERN. Die ATLAS-Kollaboration ist gemeinsam mit einem weiteren Forschungsteam vor allem für die Entdeckung des Higgs-Teilchens 2012 bekannt. Das Projekt wird auch historiographische Leitlinien ausarbeiten, die auf kommende epistemologische Studien moderner wissenschaftlicher Kollaborationen übertragen werden können. Die Projektergebnisse werden ein umfassendes Bild der modernen Forschungspraxis in der Teilchenphysik bieten und gleichzeitig zur Philosophie der kollektiven Wissensgenerierung beitragen.
Ziel
The present project will contribute to research in the history and philosophy of science through extensive use of state-of-the-art tools from the digital humanities. The project will focus on an investigation of recent research practice in particle physics at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in order to gain a better understanding of how knowledge is generated and validated in very large scientific collaborations. The main working hypothesis of the project is that collective research processes can be characterized, in epistemologically relevant terms, through a bird’s eye view analysis of the collaboration’s internal communication. The internal communication will be reconstructed from born-digital documents (e-mails, internal wiki pages, etc.) which accrue in the research practice of the collaboration. Abstracting from the case study, the project will also develop historiographic guidelines that can be transferred to future epistemological studies of modern scientific collaborations. Last but not least, the project will contribute to the philosophy of collective knowledge generation, in particular to recent issues in “network epistemology”, by adapting the theoretical models to better fit important real-world cases.
Until recently, it was nearly impossible to capture large-scale and complex research processes, such as the ones at CERN, and make them accessible for epistemological analysis. Almost all the studies of the research practice at CERN or similar cases have so far been restricted to the analysis of published articles, selected interviews and participant observation. Accompanied by historiographic guidelines and practical strategies (both of which are lacking at the moment) for best practices in the history and philosophy of science based on born-digital sources, the application of digital tools and computational methods may finally help us attain a maximally comprehensive picture of recent research practice in particle physics and beyond.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophyepistemology
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencescomputational science
- humanitiesother humanitieslibrary sciencesdigital humanities
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedGastgebende Einrichtung
10623 Berlin
Deutschland