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Contemporary fundamental science has a number of significant contrasts with the science of the early 20th century. Having become a complex social institution, it demanded eliciting and scrutinizing the communities that make up research teams and the features of their interaction. A number of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have undertaken outstanding studies (Collins & Evans, 2002; Galison, 1987; Hoddeson et al., 2008; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour, 1979; Pickering, 1988; Traweek, 1988). The contemporary views of ethical aspects of engineering and technology designs have recently been the focus of ethical theorists’ attention (Doorn, 2012; Roeser, 2012; Umbrello, 2019). The objective of this work is to examine the phenomenon of the contemporary science community in its development and the influence of the rise of an elementary particle accelerator and a complex elementary particle detector on the amplification of the social structure, the deepening of the epistemic division of labor, and the need for lengthy engineering activity at the preparation stage for experiments. To accomplish that task, it becomes necessary to clarify the roles of the different members of scientific communities and the dynamics of changes in their structure and to discuss the difficulties of classification and identities of community members, as well as ethical issues that arise at the present stage in the relationship of scientific and engineering activities and possible ways to resolve them.
In high-energy physics, the traditional division among specializations involves three groups: theorists, experimentalists, and instrumentalists, as Galison (1987) detailed. Theorists, or theoretical physicists, comprise the group that develops high-level theories and models of phenomena to be sought by experiments (e.g., the Higgs model, theories beyond the Standard Model, quantum chromodynamics). Experimentalists are physicists who guide and participate in the design of detectors and, most importantly, perform measurements and conduct data analysis. Instrumentalists have emerged as a community involved in the creation of scientific instruments and installations.
Notably, the rise of the accelerator in the 1930s and 1940s was the first milestone in the development of a modern complex physics experiment and the complication of the community structure associated with large-scale experiments in high-energy physics. First, the emergence of such a large and complex device led to the appearance of accelerator physicists (and engineers) as scientific and technical specialists. Their tasks comprised designing the accelerator, calculating and optimizing its parameters, and ensuring its operation (providing particle beams accelerated to the required energies and intensities to the community of experimentalists). The creation of the accelerator led to the spatial separation of the theoretician working silently in their ivory tower from the experimentalist, who now spent most of their time in the experimental halls near the accelerator, where their installation was established. In addition to the communities of experimentalists and theorists and at the beginning of experiments on accelerators, a community of accelerator specialists emerged who engaged in creating and maintaining the accelerator machine. Formally, accelerator scientists could be classified as instrumentalists because the accelerator is a technically sophisticated device whose operating principles are based on well-corroborated classical electrodynamics. However, in such a case, the community of instrumentalists would result in heterogeneity because the expertise of the accelerator researcher and the instrumentalist who builds, for example, a particle detector, would differ.