Synchronization and the Timework of Code Development in Physics

• In Event: The Temporal Repertoire

Abstract

Synchronization is a recurring theme in recent work on the cultural politics of time. For Sharma (2014), synchronization refers to the use of tactics and technologies of the self to accommodate normalizing temporal orders. Similarly, work in science studies emphasizes the often-overlooked timework performed by technicians as they go about maintaining and repairing complex laboratory instruments (Bruyninckx 2017). Apart from these explicitly political arguments, synchronizations are also apparent in Rheinberger’s account of operational coupling between experimental systems “endowed with their own times” (Rheinberger 1997, 181). In the latter, synchronizations emerge as material relationships and traces linking representations across distinct research contexts.

This paper relates these two approaches to synchronization (as relationship of temporal power and as representational relationship) through a discussion of simulation development practices in a computational physics lab. Both conceptions of synchronization are needed to account for the epistemic politics of simulations in physics. Simulation codes are important technical conditions for both theoretical and experimental work in physics—they link a range of research activities and they must accommodate the broad temporal order of the field. Simulationists themselves, however, relate to their codes as provisional objects of study, not as stable technical conditions. Asserting simulation’s status as a research activity involves managing the temporal relationships that span and organize the collective enterprise of physics. This argument is empirically grounded in semistructured interviews and participant observation of physicists in a plasma simulation lab.

Author

• Seth Erickson, Penn State University