Long abstract/rationale to my talk at the Max Planck für Wissenschaftgeschicte, Sept 6, 2 pm
The purpose of this talk is to look at an aspect of speculative physics, which is the larger topic of my dissertation-in-progress, in relation to what it signifies in theoretical quantum physics (both ordinary and relativistic, including aspects of quantum field theory) and in experimental particle physics, elucidating the points of connections between them. However, as the objects I am concentrating on for the purpose of the dissertation are the big experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the form of ATLAS and CMS (and a to a much lesser extent, CDF, D0, and the LHCb), as well as the potentialities of the LHC itself as media for thinking about the ontological conditions of knowledge-making and dissemination, I focus mainly on 1) Decision-making that takes place during data-analysis to understand how selection is made. I will mostly be looking at the data collected in the process of the Higgs searches, as well as that relating to searches of particles within the supersymm