Miller Center | The Search for Stillness | Tiffany Nichols
Miller Center | The Search for Stillness | Tiffany Nichols
The Search for Stillness:
Attempts to Transform Environments Laboratories and the Early History of Site Selection of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
As physics instruments become increasingly complex, scientists face new challenges in determining where to site. Dr. Nichols's work explores the complicated histories of site selection, as scientists considered natural and built environments while conceptualizing laboratories as distinct from those surrounding spaces. This ideal of isolation faltered when the environment could not be controlled in the laboratory, as was the case with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), a device designed to study astronomical events that may have occurred more than a billion years prior. In this session, we will discuss a pre-circulated chapter from Dr. Nichols's book. The work reveals how physicists deployed mediating tools to construct an imaginary environment despite instances of the real environment dispelling their laboratory vision, and it explores local community responses to the site selection process. Dr. Nichols makes clear the ways the environment is a constituent component of the laboratory.
Tiffany Nichols is a professor of History and Civil and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. Lunch will be provided at this event.
Please be sure to RSVP by 12 noon on Friday October 25 using this form.