Detector traditions passed under the probe

Abstract

For the past few years, historians of science have been probing a previously neglected aspect of scientific development – the changes in research practices and the way in which scientists actually do physics, biology or medicine. Central to these practices are techniques, instruments and technologies that have, particularly since the Second World War, increased enormously in cost and complexity. These tools have also reconfigured the experimental workplace and changed the meaning of “an experiment” – indeed, of what it exactly means to be a physicist, biologist or any other type of scientist.