Date:
Location:
"Expanding the Astrophysics Laboratory: Environment, Ecosystem, and Experiment"
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Tiffany Nichols, PhD Candidate, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University; Graduate Student Fellow, the Black Hole Initiative; NSF Grantee.
Contact:
Emily Neill
erneill@hks.harvard.edu
Co-sponsored by Harvard STS and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMsfu-gqzkoHNDZoBX3rVCz65WT9EBMyejb
Please note: This event requires registration in advance in order to receive the meeting link and password.
Abstract:
This talk focuses on moments when physicists leave their laboratory spaces, equipped with mediating devices, and enter an epistemic space, which I call the expanded laboratory, to identify and understand the output signals produced by experimental instrumentation—here laser interferometers. I define the expanded laboratory as the ecosystem surrounding the laboratory buildings and structures that becomes embedded in the output signals of the instruments therein. I am interested in those instances when outside activities pass through the boundary walls of the laboratory and become embedded in the signals and data of the instruments, leading to evolutions or reconfigurations in the lab’s scientific and social activities, along with the material culture of experimental instrumentation. Such a move expands prior inquiries into the epistemologies of laboratory spaces and experiments by bringing into view the histories and practices of site assessment and selection, how scientists understand and perceive the expanded laboratory and modify their instruments in attempts to tame this space, and how those landscapes can have profound influences on their experiments.
