CERN, a social experiment

CERN (Center of European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a European research organization that has attracted a great deal of attention from all disciplines of social sciences as an object of study. Not surprisingly. In CERN operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, 10.000 physicists around the world are taking part in the experiments and 2.250 of them are employed at CERN. The Center is established on the Swiss–Franco border and perceived as a hyper-border place for global collaboration, where science exists beyond the politics of nationality. In order to promote cooperation, each article they publish must cite all the participants (sometimes up to 2,500 people) as authors. Moreover, its peer review is quite problematic since the most qualified people in the world to review it are already working in CERN. This unique establishment has been studied in multiple aspects: what are the rituals and symbols of this community? How decisions are made? How the science is articulated through things and sings? What are the processes producing knowledge?

Scientists at CERN, including Fabiola Gianotti, the current Director General

In the following video  Ariana Bottelli presents the results of the interdisciplinary, DFG-funded project-cluster “Epistemology of the LHC – Large Hadron Collider ” (University of Wuppertal, Germany)  that attempted to investigate knowledge production “in real time” by following the interplay of theory and experiment unfold during the first phase of LHC activity and how the knowledge landscape of high energy physics accordingly did (or did not) change.

http://cds.cern.ch/video/1516534?showTitle=true

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