Nature
News: "I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist
Arpita
Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of
particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing
to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory
near Geneva, Switzerland.The LHC carries the hopes of
generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach
energies never before achieved in a collider
and—possibly—to produce a zoo of particles new to
science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing
together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent
years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and
philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these
densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes
explode.
