Items related to Image and Logic – A Material Culture of Microphysics

Image and Logic – A Material Culture of Microphysics - Softcover

Galison, Peter

 
9780226279176: Image and Logic – A Material Culture of Microphysics
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0226279170 ISBN 13: 9780226279176
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1997

Synopsis

This study engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. It reveals how the ever-increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions. At the beginning of this century, physics was usually done by a lone researcher who put together experimental apparatus on a benchtop. Now experiments are frequently larger than a city block, and experimental physicists lead very different lives - programming computers, working with industry, co-ordinating vast teams of scientists and engineers, and playing politics. The author describes how, as a result of these changes, the necessity for teamwork in operating multimillion-dollar machines has created dynamic "trading zones", where instrument makers, theorists and experimentalists meet, share knowledge, and co-ordinate the extraordinarily diverse pieces of the culture of modern microphysics - work, machines, evidence and argument.

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About the Author

Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is author of How Experiments End, published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of The Disunity of Science: Contexts, Boundaries, and Power.

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Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Publication date
1997
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0226279170
ISBN 13 
9780226279176
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
982