Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science (review)

In the last twenty years, the U.S. Department of Energy, which funds most accelerator-based science, has spent about $2 billion annually to operate and construct facilities, mostly accelerators serving various disciplines. Although funding has remained high (and in fact, has increased with the 2006 construction of the $1.3 billion Spallation Neutron Source) a sea change has occurred: in 1980 the most expensive accelerators were for particle physics; in 2010, the most expensive accelerators, like the Spallation Neutron Source, were for investigating biological and other materials.

Given the magnitude of the investment we should understand this change and how it has affected federally sponsored knowledge production. A few of us have begun the task, working from a historical perspective. It was welcome news that this book appeared with a description from a sociological point of view of the shift away from particle physics at Cornell University’s synchrotron, one of the smaller U.S. laboratories funded by the National Science Foundation.

Park Doing explains that his aim was to investigate “whether the product of scientific practice . . . is contingent on that practice” (p. 22). To find out, he gathered information for eight years in the 1990s as an accelerator operations employee at Cornell, making observations and conclusions by going “back and forth between the working world of the laboratory and the world of philosophical reflection on that work” (p. 39). In particular he focused on three episodes with physicists, operators, and biologists to explore “epistemic politics,” that is, the way in which “technical knowledge claims are implicated in modes of authority, access and control” (pp. 1–2). He concludes that “resources and access were renegotiated and put to use in new, enduring ways with regard to technical and scientific assertions amid changing relations of authority and control.” In particular, he observes “fundamental changes in the epistemic-political fabric of scientific practice,” as the laboratory was realigned from physics toward biology. Nonetheless he finds that “change was not implicated in the epistemic status of the products of that practice” (p. 143). Instead, Doing sees a “velvet revolution,” reminiscent of that in Czechoslovakia: Instead of “top down” change, “work was required on the part of the people and groups involved to assert an[d] maintain newly accepted ways of knowing that belied the seeming effortlessness of the regime change” (p. 140).

Doing, a sociologist of science, situates his arguments within that field’s discussion. Historians interested in the development of multidisciplinary large-scale science will find helpful insights. For example, the notion of epistemic politics can inform investigation of complex negotiations in multidisciplinary experimentation such as those on the floor of the new large materials science accelerators. As we try to unravel what happens there, it is indeed useful to keep in mind that what various groups deem to be knowledge indeed shapes all matter of discourse, equipment, decision making, and outcomes.

For his part, Doing could use help from historians. Although I was impressed with his decision to connect the Cornell case to larger trends, I was disappointed at how much he got wrong about the outside world. The Advanced Photon Source is at Argonne, not at Fermilab; the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is not a replacement for the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) but a different type of accelerator. Moreover, accelerator building did not stop in the 1990s, and the rise of the new large accelerators did not result from growing disfavor of particle physics. In fact, the large accelerators of the 1990s and 2000s got approval thanks to SSC proponents, who hoped that the development of these projects would stem criticism and competition harmful to the SSC’s prospects. Finally, accelerator-based science did not shift from “physics” to “biology,” but from particle physics to materials science, with studies of biological materials being an important part of a mix that also included (and arguably was dominated by) condensed-matter physics. Doing’s mistakes create doubt that he truly...