Experiment in High-energy Physicsas a Heterogeneous Net of Translation of Interests:an Actor-Network Analysis

Abstract

Actor-Net Theory (ANT) as one of the leading directions in science and techno­logy studies (STS) is a group of approaches based on the works of Bruno Latour. Most often, the main thesis of ANT is considered the claim that non-human ac­tors act as participants of interactions equal to people. The notion of the active role of non-human actors constitutes a fundamental difference between ANT and the early social constructivist approaches that limit the construction of facts to sociality as specifically human. In this paper, we examine the history of inter­national scientific cooperation in high-energy physics, which arose in the 1970s – 1980s between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna) and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (USA) in connection with experimental studies of small-angle proton scattering on protons, in the framework of ANT. We show that the experiments under discussion can be represented as a network of hetero­geneous actors in which mutual translations of epistemic and political interests occur, and any clear division into context and content cannot be established.