Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

Yesterday, I had a very fruitful discussion with one of my professors on my work (and very intense as well) and since that has revived some thoughts I have on my project that is currently on hold due to other commitments, I will jot them here ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CERN is like the UN in some ways, but not in all ways. For example, not all the employees based there are directly employed by CERN. Some were sent over as 'labor' and 'expertise' contribution by various institutions who collaborate with CERN, even though they may be there pretty much long-term, so the salary scale and even benefits differ. Also, there are the shiftworkers (shift work can be extremely exciting or the most boring job in the world, depending on what happens during shifts. Once again, it reminds me a lot of the whole Star Trek trope). The politics involved are interesting to explore because it actually affects the way in which the organization, ...

The confluence of science fiction, cybernetics, and scientific ontology constitutes an intersection between predictions, myth-making, hypotheses, phenomenal gestures, thought-experiments and material realization. Science fiction is not a genre by which one can easily position textual productions and reproductions of scientific ideas in either sublimated or pedagogically direct forms. At the same time, the potentiality of science fiction has spurred scientists and philosophers of science to model postulations, and theoretically-produced predictions in the sciences, on its ‘narrative,’ especially in areas that are still epistemically speculative. As Godfrey-Smith suggests, model-based science is motivated by the complex nature of the scientific target and the employment of exact methods (3). Even then, as the mathematicians will tell you, the final goal is to create a general enough model, so that it can be the public key by which one can unlock the encrypted data nature has bestowed u...

The result of my summer stint at CERN and Niels Bohr has enabled me to further narrow the focus of my dissertation topic. But I am not all there yet! --------------------------------------------------------------- I am sending you and the Center for the History of Physics a short report regarding my almost 7-day stint at the Niels Bohr Library at the ACP. I was there from July 19-23, and then for a few hours on July 30 and Aug 2 respectively. I have found my stay there to be very conducive in helping me narrow down on some of the questions which I wanted to address for my dissertation. I have spent most of my time there looking at the available Archives for the Quantum History Project initiated by Thomas Kuhn and John Heilbron, as well as a book (out of the many available volumes) on the primary materials relating to and by Niels Bohr. I have visited the library in the aftermath of my two-week stint at CERN and have found it useful and tracing some of the epistemological developmen...

LIT 20: Science in Context: Imagining science through culture, gender, and art Course Description The course begins by teasing out the multiple facets of science; looking at the origin of its meaning and the multiplicity of meanings beyond what you have been taught in science classes in high school and college. We will be reading excerpts of books on the subjects of the course title, some journal articles, watch a film or two, view some documentaries and examine multimodal creations of virtual ‘labs’, electronic science ‘texts’ (which do not consist solely of words) and the technological application of the natural sciences in design, aesthetics and non-scientific work/production. We will even spend some class time discussing the meaning of the ‘non-scientific’ and discover that it is not merely the opposite of ‘science’. We will look at actual science pieces, works performing science, works playing with science, works communicating science and works theorizing science. We will have cl...

I know I haven't had time to write up on my last few days at CERN, despite the interviews I've conducted and discussions with two eminent theoretical physicists (one of whom was a colleague of Richard Feynman, John Ellis). But I will try to get to it soon once I am done with my sojourn to the the library at the American Center of Physics, College Park. As I am now reading through the files on the profiles of the eminent physicists documented by Thomas Kuhn and Co for their History of QM project, and looking at where they've published and also the contents of their publication, I am reminded by what Michelangelo Mangano said when he spoke of physics being an elite profession in the early part of the twentieth century, and how much more famous a large percentage of the physicists were compared to today, I am also reminded of how much easier it is to publish in famous journals such as Science, Nature and also the Philosophical Magazine (which is a journal dedicated to the na...

I know I haven't written about the last few days about my work, and I hope to remedy that soon. So far, too many things to catch up on and I'm exhausted post international travel. But I'll like to paste the page to this interesting site that will keep you informed of some of the most important parameters experimentalists at the LHC are looking up for and how much weight they place on these factors in helping them in elucidating an experimental breakthrough that will either explain or disproved existing theories of particle and nuclear physics  Refresh this link for constant updates, though some updates may not come for hours. The increasing luminosity is good news for the physicist, for they place much weight on its ontological importance for good and high quality collisions. Now I have to go back to preparing for tomorrow's visit to the Niels Bohr Library and Archive. I haven't had time to go see much of the sights yet, being tired as I am now. Might just slee...

Which of course, is less exciting for the particle physicists and also the public at large. Today, the PS (Proton Synchrotron) Booster had a bit of a problem, so they had to trace the entire diameter of it in the tunner to find out what's causing the 'beam leak' during the injection process. While I managed to learn more about how luminosity can be increased by improving the capability of multibunching (which means to enable multiple bunches (a bunch will consists of a few million of packets of protons) to be transfered at the same time. Of course, a lot of delicate maneuverings of the machine would be involved here, even as injection studies are done, as they have to make sure that they know exactly how the beam is moving about through the dipole magnets at all times. However, due to some problems at the Booster (and also some other problems at another sector), they had to ramp down the magnets and shut off the beam just so that the engineers can go down into the tunner to...