Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

First results from Heavy Ion collisions at the LHC (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS)  I missed the first two events because I overslept (!) due to my weird sleeping habits nowadays (I can't sleep when I try to sleep earlier). But at least I caught Jurgen talking about ALICE's results. I can look at the slides for the rest (not that one can make as much sense to me without some explanation). It does seem as if they are getting the sort of results they have been looking forward to, even exceeding expectations. For ALICE as least, they've got all they want on the QGP , which is exciting. Finally they are beginning to feel like they are doing 'real physics' with actual data for 'new physics' instead of merely calibrating the tools many times over.  

This idea came to me as I was working on a project for a visual studies class that tries to use as its subject matter the history of Durham (see www.digitaldurham.duke.edu).  I worked on history of the Duke Family (because their papers are most readily accessible from the University Archives of Duke, where I go to school). But the larger idea was the excavation of 'dead' epistemology, and working through the 'dead' histories of once 'living' objects that are still connected to the living 'members' of the community through genetic and social ties got me thinking about the sort of knowledge generated before the growth in experimental particle physics, and the sorts of knowledge that have come and gone before the LHC was even built, and also the knowledge that came to pass WHEN the LHC was built (one just has to go through the large archives of materials relating to the planning, organizing and building of the LHC). I've written up extensively on this ...