Description du projet
Acquérir de nouvelles connaissances: le cas d’une collaboration sur la physique des particules
Comment les nouvelles connaissances sont-elles générées et validées dans les collaborations de recherche modernes et à grande échelle? C’est une question importante à laquelle le projet NEPI, financé par l’UE, entend répondre. Pour ce faire, il utilisera des outils de pointe issus des humanités numériques et ciblera la collaboration ATLAS au laboratoire de physique des particules du CERN. La collaboration ATLAS, couplée à une autre équipe de recherche, est surtout connue pour la découverte du boson de Higgs en 2012. Le projet développera également des lignes directrices historiographiques pouvant être utilisées dans de futures études épistémologiques de collaborations scientifiques modernes. Les travaux du projet dresseront un tableau complet de la récente pratique en matière de recherche dans la physique des particules et au-delà, tout en contribuant à la philosophie de la création de connaissances collectives.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophyepistemology
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencescomputational science
- humanitiesother humanitieslibrary sciencesdigital humanities
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régime de financement
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedInstitution d’accueil
10623 Berlin
Allemagne