10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17403
application/pdf
2038-3460
17403
1
en
Assunta Viteritti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Sophie Houdart, Les Incommensurables, Zones Sensible, 2015
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Book Reviews
2018-08-06
2023-06-25
2018-08-06
2023-08-28
135-138
TS
Assunta Viteritti
2018/08/06
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17403
135
Sapienza Università di Roma
2038-3460
1
en
138
Sophie Houdart, Les Incommensurables, Zones Sensible, 2015
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17403/16261
9
Book Review                                                              135
   Sophie Houdart
Les Incommensurables, Brussels, Zones Sensible, 2015, pp. 192

Assunta Viteritti Sapienza Università di Roma

    “The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) […] is the largest and most pow-
erful particle accelerator in the world. It is in the form of a 26.659-
kilometre ring and located 100 meters underground beneath the small
town of Meyrin, on the border between France and Switzerland. It’s a
huge machine made of magnets, superconductors and acceleration struc-
tures that increase the energy of particles that circulate in it. Every day,
two beams of particles circulate inside the accelerator in opposite direc-
tions at very high levels of energy before they collide. The particles,
launched at 99.99999991% of the speed of light, complete 11,245 revolu-
tions of the accelerator per second and collide approximately 600 million
times per second. Les Incommensurables is a meticulous field study of
this buried “cathedral”. It offers us the opportunity of connecting with
the mysteries and immensity of the universe and access something that,
while it goes well beyond humanity, also contains it, a modern expression
of transcendence.”
    The back cover of the book encourages the readers and the volume
doesn’t betray their expectations. Increasingly large instruments for stud-
ying the infinitely small, developed over decades across numerous fields
of physics research; thousands of physicists from around the world work-
ing with and on the machine; thousands of practical observations con-
ducted every day; the constant accumulation over time of data and
knowledge produced collectively; the stratified construction over time of
a machine that grows on itself in order to peer into the depths of matter:
this is the world of CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) seen
through the eyes of Sophie Houdart who, with a marvellous and lucid
narrative, takes us, historically and geographically, inside, through and
over the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is an underground
place where generations of physicists from around the world accelerate
and intersect particles in a circular underground tunnel, twenty-seven
kilometers in circumference and built one hundred meters below ground.
The author leads her readers into the world of particle physics research
with an ethnographic work conducted together with two artists – a pho-
tographer and a visual artist – in order to connect languages and create
resonances and bridges between science and the outside world.
    Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist and researcher at the French Na-
tional Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is the author of numer-
ous books and research papers and is a passionate scientist of human and
non-human things (Houdart and Thiery 2011), insects – such as the dro-
sophile – included (Houdart 2008). She specialized in Japanese studies,
taking a particular interest in methods of construction, on a local scale, of
136                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

modernity, innovation, science and technology. Her body of work is a
journey from the scientific culture of Japanese microbiology laboratories
to the world’s largest particle accelerator. On the long trail of STS stud-
ies, her research focusses on the key area of laboratory studies (Latour
and Woolgar 1979) taking us inside the world of science, like Lilliputians
in the world of Gulliver. Scientific practice, in all fields, is not immune to
be investigated by social sciences (as Robert Merton normatively pre-
scribed).
    In this book, Houdart leads and challenges her readers through a
work of scale and measurement, from the large to the small, attempting to
track all connections that make this passage possible (p. 8). She draws us
inside and around a place that has acquired the image of a sacred monu-
ment of contemporary science, highlighting the massive nature of the
LHC, while finding a language that allows us to appreciate the dizzying
size of knowledge of the universe. She describes how the great machine,
ever since its inception, has been a mobile process that seeks to stabilize
connections in order to render commensurable the incommensurable.
    The author takes us on a journey into the history and the geography of
the CERN. We begin at the end of the 1950s, when the CERN was a Eu-
ropean expression of Big Science. Governments, countries and popula-
tions were all involved in the decision to install it on the border between
Switzerland and France. She describes the site inspections, the negotia-
tions of accords, the controversies on a local and global level between
administrators, politicians, international agencies, physicists and farmers
with their pasturing cows, allowing us to witness first-hand the concep-
tion of a highly exceptional machine. In the same way that Bruno Latour,
in his work on microbes and Pasteur, took us into the pasteurization of
France, here Houdart shows us how the setting up of CERN and the
LHC built the culture of modern physics in post-war Europe. The geog-
raphy of the place became a laboratory, not in the open air – as in Pas-
teur’s case (Latour 1984) – but underground and precisely on the border
between countries and cultures, but also the geography of the place – le
pays de Gex –, becomes a laboratory. It is indeed this incommensurable
tension between territory and laboratory that Houdart describes (pp.
177-178).
    In her description we see how Mertonian communitarianism chal-
lenged history and geography with a thousand compromises, the financial
effort involved, the accumulation of projects, and the ceaseless struggle in
the search for the Higgs boson – the subatomic particle involved in the
formation of stars, planets and life itself after the Big Bang of 13.7 billion
years ago – that fueled years of work at the LHC, culminating in the No-
bel Prize for Higgs in 2013.
    The author takes us alongside the work of various researchers, techni-
cians, operators and, as readers, we become knowledgeable. We follow,
in the trails of laboratory studies, the routine nature of the work of pro-
Book Review                                                             137
ducing scientific data and, thus, we see how permanent maintenance of
the great machine require the uninterrupted production of data and the
subsequent elaboration of the mountain of data produced. We follow her
description of the daily and nightly work in the control center and see
how routines break down whenever a critical mechanical failure occurs,
which is also a significant event in the daily life of the workers involved.
The work of the scientists moves back and forth between the machine,
the data and the particles. It is an uninterrupted task of constant connec-
tions between the many work teams, where routine is everything and also
nothing. What the ethnographer follows is the bricolage work, where the
profession of the scientist fluctuates between the maximum precision of
measurements in a highly-sophisticated device and the daily challenges of
an artisan: the practical aspect of knowing how to do science. The scien-
tists, who live night and day next the great machine (which is always un-
der construction), are described by Houdart as the artisans that meticu-
lously, and with daily care, live with and love their machine. Houdart’s
work shows how discovering the Higgs boson was not the result of some
miraculous collision, but rather the final result of billions of statistical
elaborations of billions of measurements taken in a constant work of re-
fining, homogenising and monumentalising science, but also the work of
a constant monitoring of the environmental conditions taking place above
and around the CERN. The book takes us inside the machine rather than
inside the theories of physics and highlights the symmetry of the social
and material dimensions of the scientific work. Houdart gives us a highly
impassioned description and displays sensitivity towards something that
we do not understand, demonstrating the sociomaterial heterogeneity of
the knowledge produced around this enormous scientific device.
     In the first chapter, “Le pré des vaches” [The cows’ pasture], the au-
thor writes as a historical anthropologist. She tells, through many details,
anecdotes, photos and documents, how the CERN was born, and how
farmers, scientists, and administrators of different countries found
agreements, over time, to decide where to build the research center.
     The second chapter called “Maillage” [Mesh] tells how as ethnog-
rapher she entered in the field. As readers, we are immersed in the daily
life of the ethnographers who build trust and relationships with the scien-
tists, technicians and operators who constantly monitor the territory
above and around the CERN and that allow it to work properly.
     In the third chapter “Le LHC, the vaisseau spatial et les opérateurs”
[The LHC, the spaceship and the operators] the ethnographers get in the
big underground spaceship. Night and day operators (the working scien-
tists) are at work. They monitor the body of the machine and every one of
its breath.
     In the fourth chapter titled “Précisions” [Precisions] we follow the
uncertain and the ambiguous work, in which the scientists are engaged:
the measurements. What we find, through the storytelling of Houdart,
138                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

are distortions, deviations and continuous attempts to find alignments
between the different measurements – forms of commensurability. This is
the everyday work of scientists: looking for alignments between meas-
urements.
    The fifth and last chapter, “Grandeurs et certitudes” [Magnitude and
certainties] assuming the non-visible appearance of the Higgs boson on
the scene, and the quantification of the certitude of such appearance at
99,9999% proposes a summarizing reflection on the tension between
commensurability and incommensurability across many scales that the
precision of measurement of the CERN requires.
     Assumed theoretically by Higgs from the beginning of the 60s, the
boson now enter in the (im)material world produced by the LHC hard
work. Though not seen, the detection of the traces left by its mass allows
it to change mode of existence passing from a virtual to a real entity. But
such detection has been made possible by the constant work of monitor-
ing, controlling, maintaining of the scientists, technicians and operators
above and below the pays de Gex, so wonderfully described by Houdart.
    In 2017 the film The Sense of Beauty was released. It had been shot
inside the CERN, under the direction of Valerio Jalongo. A steadycam
takes us inside the mysterious, almost sacred international laboratory of
research physics and face-to-face with the LHC, the poetic machine, the
particle accelerator that allows us to approach the very brink of the Big
Bang. The film goes inside the community of scientists working like bees
in a hive on and around the machine. It creates a resonance between the
vision of the machine and the works of international artists inspired by
the discoveries of physics: art revealing the invisible of physics. As Sophie
Houdart shows, the machine of the incommensurable is the result of
enormous economic investments (estimated at more than six billion eu-
ros), the largest mobilisation in the world of the scientific community of
physicists, the contribution of governments, computers, machines, inge-
nuity, theories, bodies and journals; what Houdart defines as “le texture
de la cosmologie moderne” [the texture of the modern cosmology]. What
will happen now, after the discovery that led to the Nobel Prize? Where
will Fabiola Gianotti take the CERN after the invisible vision of the
Higgs boson?

References
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory life: The social construction of sci-
       entific facts, Beverly Hills, Sage.
Latour, B. (1988) The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Uni-
       versity Press.
Houdart, S. and Thiery, O. (eds.) (2011) Humains, non-humains. Comment re-
       peupler les sciences sociales, Paris, La Découverte.
Houdart, S. (2008) La cour des miracles: ethnologie d'un laboratoire japonais,
       Paris, PUF.
