Signatura rerum: Semiotics of the Subnuclear

Abstract

AbstractOn July 4, 2012, experimental physicists on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, in Switzerland, announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. After analyzing trillions of proton-to-proton collisions, two teams of physicists concluded that signatures of diphotons in the final state were evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs particle. The answerability of a particle search to polysemic signals raises a deeply provocative question: In what ways does a sign facilitate the discovery of a thing? Drawing on fieldwork at the Large Hadron Collider complex, this article attempts to probe the semiosis of signatures as a palimpsest of inherent possibilities spanning the width of the universe, which is neither a contingent ordering of the Saussurean kind nor a brick-by-brick Peircean construct. What it eloquently foregrounds is the capacity of a class of signs to reflect the presence of objects, even those that are materially nonexistent, which resolves many a metaphysical perplexity involving lang...