A Comparative Social Morphology of Scientific Judgment in Theoretical Physics

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06.

Abstract

For the past forty years, high energy physics has become increasingly divorced from experimental tests, threatening its status as a scientific enterprise. Currently, this community is divided between two opposed formulations of quantum gravity: string theory (ST) and loop quantum gravity (LQG). Based on historical comparison of their formation and in-depth interviews conducted with their leading practitioners, this paper argues that the rival conceptual aesthetics of these communities—e.g. their opposed epistemic priorities and theoretical tastes—are both based in and expressed through the distinctive social trajectories of their members. ST’s inheritance of the pragmatic epistemic culture of American particle physics has permitted it to become a dominant aesthetics, in which collaborative “thought experiments” are interpreted as objectively deductive and in accord with the scientific method. LQG, meanwhile, has been relegated to a dominated aesthetics on the academic periphery with about one-tenth the researchers of ST, with its followers respecting the dominance of ST while insisting on the goal of direct experimental inquiry and questioning the rigor of raw theoretical collaborations. These rival forms of aesthetics are interpreted as the product of a struggle over the nature of science when falsifiability is no longer a realistic goal. This paper offers a structuralist explanation for theoretical physics building on previous ethnographic work conducted by Knorr-Cetina and Collins. In so doing, I combine Daston and Galison’s depiction of “trained judgment” as a distinctive contemporary epistemic virtue with Bourdieu’s portrayal of judgment (e.g. in Distinction) as an act of social positioning.

Author

• Thomas Krendl Gilbert, University of California, Berkeley