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For both epistemological and historiographical reasons, we must recognize that experimental and theoretical training, skills, and judgments are not necessarily coextensive. In the future, as other branches of natural science undergo the schism between theory and experiment, we will need a better qualitative picture of the relation of theorists to experimenters. It will have to capture the partial autonomy of each, without implying that they never interact. One model for this relation might come from cultural history, where historians must regularly grapple with multiple subcultures within a single society. Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant study of a sixteenth-century miller’s cosmology illustrates the problem. Ginzburg shows how his miller took fragments of developed Christian theology and embedded them in a concrete, materialist context, likening creation itself to the spontaneous generation of worms in cheese. By exploring the internal coherence of the peasants’ world view, Ginzburg depicts a peasant “low” culture that is not just a “distortion” of high culture, nor totally independent of it. Each culture necessarily borrows from the other, transforming the borrowed material and incorporating it into its central concerns. Renaissance society embraced both high and low cultures. Similarly, we can consider the larger discipline of physics as encompassing a culture of experimenters and one of theorists, each with its own standards of demonstration, commitments to methods, and programmatic goals. The distinction between the two cultures has existed for most of the twentieth century, but the scale and complexity of high-energy physics has widened the gap.

Distant Worlds - Welcomes Katrina Jack!

Distant Worlds - Welcomes Will Macmillan Jones!

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RIP Authonomy