legitimizing ess
Legitimizing ESS Big Science as a collaboration across boundaries
Edited by Thomas Kaiserfeld & Tom O’Dell
nordic academic press
The publication of this book has received generous support from The Pufendorf Institute, Lund University; The Vice Chancellor of Lund University; The Erik Philip-Sörensen Foundation; The Lars Mikael Karlsson Foundation; The Humanities Experimental Group (HEX), Lund University
Nordic Academic Press P.O. Box 1206 SE-221 05 Lund Sweden www.nordicacademicpress.com
© Nordic Academic Press and the authors 2013 Typesetting: Stilbildarna i Mölle, Frederic Täckström, sbmolle.com Jacket design: Design for livet Jacket image: A vision of the future ESS facility. Credit: ESS Printed by ScandBook, Falun 2013 ISBN 978-91-87351-10-5
Contents Introduction. The European Spallation Source
7
Big Science in a small Swedish university town
Thomas Kaiserfeld & Tom O’Dell
1. The ESS from neutron gap to global strategy
25
Plans for an international research facility after the cold war
Thomas Kaiserfeld
2. Myths and realities of the ESS project
43
A systematic scrutiny of readily accepted ‘truths’
Olof Hallonsten
3. Mobile spaces of affect
67
A cultural history of the future
Tom O’Dell
4. The ESS in the local news media
85
Expectations, investigations, and mobilization
Tobias Linné
5. The ESS and the geography of innovation Josephine V. Rekers
105
6. Reaching the inside from the outside?
123
Member identification and auto-communication during organizational transition
Sara von Platen
7. Social media and research practices in Big Science
143
The example of MAX-lab
Birgitta G. Olander
8. Designing for the future Scientific instruments as technical objects in experimental systems
Kerstin Sandell
163
9. Believing in the ESS
Scale, vision, and pioneering
Max Liljefors
10. Technoscience comes to Lund
The ESS and the Enlightenment vision
Victoria HÜÜg
11. The momentum of maturity
187
205
223
What to do with ageing Big Science facilities Gustav Holmberg
About the authors
237
Index of organizations
239
introduction
The European Spallation Source Big Science in a small Swedish university town Thomas Kaiserfeld & Tom O’Dell In July 2012, Time Magazine carried an article explaining one of the most important discoveries made by physicists in recent decades. It was the fruit of Big Science research at the particle physics facility CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. After a half century of searching, scientists had found strong evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, popularly referred to as ‘the God Particle’, which is believed to give all other particles mass. However, Jeffrey Kluger, the journalist who wrote the Time Magazine article, had difficulty describing what had actually happened at CERN. As he hesitantly explained: If physicists didn’t sound so smart, you’d swear they were making half this stuff up. The universe began with a big bang called, well, the Big Bang. It’s filled with wormholes and superstrings, dark matter and galactic bubbles, and assembled from little specks of stuff called fermions and leptons, top quarks and charm quarks, all of it glued together by, yes, gluons—and if you claim you understand a bit of it, you’re probably lying too. That’s the trouble with particle physics: it exists on a plane that the brain doesn’t visit—or at least most brains don’t—and wholly defies our intuitive sense of order and reason. (Kluger 2012, 30).
In the pages that followed, Kluger struggled to find simple language to explain what he himself found to be rather abstract ideas, such as the fact that our bodies are made up of empty space, quarks, and 7
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electrons. Eighty per cent of the universe is believed to be composed of something called ‘dark matter’ (which no one has actually found yet). But the Higgs boson, which the scientists at CERN believed they had just proven to exist, might eventually help scientists find dark matter. It all seemed highly abstract and complex. But this finding had been produced by Big Science, and at some level the article seemed to adhere to the principle that if it all seemed very complicated, abstract, and hard to understand, then that was acceptable, perhaps because that was in the nature of particle physics. Indeed, perhaps that was the nature of Big Science. The main purpose of this book is to take a step back and examine the complexity of Big Science. But rather than studying the science itself—the theories shaping it, the experiments conducted under its name, its findings—the authors of this book have set out to explain the complexity of the cultural, social, and political processes that determine Big Science. The majority of chapters in this book focus on the events surrounding the planning and development of a new European facility, the European Spallation Source (ESS), to be located in Lund, a small university town in the south of Sweden. A number of the chapters in this book take a comparative approach, looking at other existing Big Science facilities in order to problematize the current and possible processes seen in the course of the ESS’s development. Together, the studies gathered here fill a void in the literature on Big Science. Where the overwhelming majority of studies of Big Science have addressed the subject from a single or very narrow set of disciplinary perspectives, an important strength of this book lies in the diversity of perspectives that it has assembled. The ten scholars behind this study are all researchers at Lund University, and represent the disciplines of archive and library sciences, art history and visual studies, ethnology, gender studies, geography, the history of ideas and science, media and communication, philosophy, and policy research (the group and its background will be discussed at greater length below). To the extent that Big Science is complex, we believe that there is a need to examine it from numerous scholarly perspectives that can illuminate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. In line with this, the ESS project has served as a prism through which the contributors 8
introduction
to this anthology have focused their attention (although each with a slightly different orientation) to produce an analysis of the wide array of cultural, social, and political processes at work behind Big Science as well as the very different roles Big Science may be given in different contexts, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally as well as historically. A second objective of this book is to study the key processes leading up to the realization of ESS, which at the moment is scheduled to come on line in 2019 and to be fully operational in 2025. Organizations have already been set up, strategies worked out, designs negotiated, financial plans made, and discussions held: all intended to influence the future performance of ESS. In this volume we focus our efforts on the ongoing discourses and practices that have already surfaced in the work of conceptualizing and building the ESS, be they political, economic, legal, scientific, communicative, or cultural. Along the same lines, we also analyse a wide range of processes that have shaped the ESS from the early 1990s to the present, involving various arenas and actors extending from the general public living in the region and the scientists engaged in the project to the policymakers and politicians who are endeavouring to steer the development of the facility.
Big Science and the ESS In the literature, ‘Big Science’ is a term that is frequently invoked, but whose meaning is widely debated. To start with, it takes the singular form, as if to imply that there is one single form of science that could fall into this category, yet many different types of endeavours are commonly referred to as being Big Science: space exploration (including everything from the building of the Apollo rockets and space shuttles to the construction of space stations and large telescopes—both land-based telescopes and space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope), deep-sea exploration, large particle accelerators, even weapons programmes such as the Manhattan Project and Star Wars. Big Science, in short, tends to be multidisciplinary. The very term Big Science means that it is thought that scale and size matter. Big Science involves scientific endeavours that are very 9
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large in many different ways, and this too needs to be made clearer in the literature. In part, a multidisciplinary approach is essential if one is to truly appreciate the degree to which size and complexity play a role in the phenomenon being studied, but moving beyond this, it needs to be noted that Big Science projects and facilities not only tend to be large in size—in some cases encompassing an entire city, or as in the case of the Earthscope programme, which is studying the geological evolution of North America, being composed of a network of monitors to study the geography of the continental United States (Galison 1992, 2)—they also typically involve huge budgets, more often than not demanding funding from multiple sources. The planning processes behind these projects involve hundreds of people, investing years of work and doing their best to anticipate what might be deemed ‘cutting-edge research’ several decades in the future. In order even to get to this planning stage, decades of political quibbling and negotiation are often required before a site is selected for a Big Science facility. Taken together, these are the salient features of the multidisciplinarity, in combination with the sheer size of the budgets, staff, and scientific instruments, which will be used to characterize Big Science in this volume, and which will be the basis for the analyses which follow. This notion of Big Science sits well with the idea that scientific instruments are at the heart of the empirical sciences, and that in order to produce a greater quantity and quality of data, instruments must necessarily become progressively larger, more powerful, and more sophisticated. This is one insight of several behind the introduction of the concept of Big Science to describe the development of instruments at research facilities in fields such as high-energy physics and astronomy (Galison 1992; Hoddeson, Kolb & Westfall 2008). In order to tackle the rising costs of new and improved scientific instruments, one important strategy has been international and global cooperation to achieve cost sharing, and indeed many initiatives over the years have stimulated international collaboration in the sciences—consider only the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, and the Human Genome Project to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs that make up human DNA (Jacob & Hallonsten 2012). Our purpose here, 10
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then, is to study these processes and their bearing on the development of the ESS. At the time that this book was being finalized, the ESS was still in the planning stages. In fact, it was little more than an organization: a state enterprise by the name of ESS Scandinavia, jointly owned by the Swedish and Danish governments, employing some 150 researchers and administrators, and behind it an agreement between seventeen European partner states to build the facility. As Olof Hallonsten shows in his contribution to this volume, the development of the ESS rested on a number of discursively structured beliefs that were often, mistakenly, accepted as established truths, not least by the media. Among the beliefs that Hallonsten analyses was the overwhelming consensus that a decision had been taken in May 2009 to build the ESS in Lund. Such was not the case, however. What had happened, as Hallonsten explains, was that the seventeen nations issued agreements of intent to contribute in various ways to the construction of the ESS—but such agreements are not legally binding. As Hallonsten makes clear, statements of intent are not at all the same as an actual de facto decision to build the ESS. In reality, at the time of the writing of this book the various actors linked to the ESS project were still endeavouring to secure its funding. From the very beginning, the ESS was envisioned as a large European project to which countries wishing to have access to the facility would contribute financially, as well as by providing materials and equipment for the project. Thus, while numerous European countries had promised funding or produced letters of intent, the actual funding of the facility was still not in place by early 2013. The global economy is weak, and the Eurozone faces numerous problems and challenges as Greece is under pressure to implement a series of austerity measures to keep its economy afloat, and Spanish banks have been forced to borrow to survive. This formed an important background to this book, for not only have the contributors studied the cultural, social, and political process surrounding an entity that did not physically yet exist, but also if the economic situation in Europe did not improve, or if it worsened, there was a possibility that the financing of the ESS would collapse, ultimately preventing the ESS facility from ever being constructed. 11
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Clearly, there were advantages and disadvantages to choosing to study the ESS rather than focusing upon other existing Big Science facilities. On the plus side was the possibility of following the planning and building of a Big Science facility in real time, using interviews and observations of the various actors involved in the efforts to realize it. Certainly, no other study has ever followed a Big Science project from the very outset in this manner. And as it turns out, because the ESS was still being planned when the studies included in this volume were conducted, it had a palpable cultural resonance that would have been more difficult to fully capture after the fact. Even as hundreds of people worked to realize the vision of the ESS, there was a sense of nervousness. The right decisions had to be made now to ensure the success of projects that would be running for decades to come. This is perhaps best shown by Kerstin Sandell’s analysis in this volume of the difficult job of designing the instruments to be used at the ESS. The basic problem confronting the design groups involved in this task is whether to build instruments that rely on known and trusted designs, at the cost of uniqueness and any significant advantage over other, older neutron sources, or to try out new designs and solutions untested by time, but which might risk jeopardizing the reliability of the instruments and thus the whole ESS enterprise. By identifying this central balancing act between innovative, uncertain instrumentation designs and reliable, dated ones, Sandell reveals the enthusiasm as well as the doubts harboured by the engineers and instrumentation specialists so crucial for any future ESS. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage faced by the authors of this book was the lack of a fully operational facility. Without a facility, it is impossible to observe scientists at work on-site or to know anything about the manner in which the actual facility will ultimately have a cultural, social, or economic impact on its surroundings, never mind society at large. So what exactly is the ESS? In the media and much of the ESS’s own promotional material, the facility is often likened to a gigantic microscope. This description, as both Max Liljefors and Tobias LinnÊ point out in their contributions to this volume, is somewhat oversimplified. The purpose of the facility will be to measure the qualities of different materials. In order to do this, protons will be 12
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accelerated to high energies, almost the speed of light, requiring an accelerator nearly 500 metres long. After acceleration, pulses of protons will hit a neutron-rich target. In some neutron spallation facilities, this target is composed of mercury, but the target at the ESS will be made of tungsten, which is claimed to be more environmentally friendly. On the protons’ impact with the target, high intensities of pulsed neutrons are released in a so-called spallation process, and then guided to the different instruments where experi ments are set up to gather information on the behaviour of the emitted neutrons as they interact with different samples, materials, construction elements, or whatever is to be analysed. Thus while the microscope metaphor may help the general public to understand that the ESS is a giant instrument that is intended to help scientists observe, measure, and better understand very small things, it does so by presenting a kinder, gentler, and more graspable science. As Linné points out, opponents to the ESS have referred to it as an atomic accelerator or nuclear reactor, metaphors far more ominous in nature than ‘microscope’, and he goes on to remind us that metaphors work to condense meaning: proponents of the ESS find the microscope metaphor a convenient one to help ease some of the social tensions that have arisen over the planned development of the facility. However, there may be other factors that have also worked to defuse potential tensions over the project. The ESS, after all, is not the only Big Science project in the works in Lund. On the contrary, Lund University has a history of constructing and running large facilities in the name of science (Forkman 2000; Hallonsten 2012). More specifically, a synchrotron radiation laboratory, MAX-lab, has been running at Lund University since the 1980s, which uses X-rays of high intensity radiated by particles undergoing acceleration to probe different types of materials. MAX-lab is currently building a new and much bigger synchrotron radiation facility, MAX IV, in Brunnshög, an area just to the north of Lund. Until 2011, Brunnshög could best be described as farmland, being a sparsely populated, rural setting primarily used for agriculture; now it is a greenfield site, earmarked for the development of both MAX IV and the ESS. (For a vision of the two facilities at Brunnshög, see Figure 5 in colour section 1). 13
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That said, the proximity to Lund University and a number of major medical and telecom businesses nevertheless means that the area was perhaps not so green a greenfield site as would first appear: by late 2012, Brunnshรถg had already been transformed into a busy building site, lending momentum to both the ESS and MAX IV. Although both MAX IV and the ESS will contain large and powerful particle accelerators as an important component in each facility, the formidable energies produced by the accelerated particles will be used in very different ways. In the case of MAX IV, it is the X-rays generated by the accelerated particles that will be used at the different experimental set-ups at the facility; at the ESS it will be neutrons emitted from the target that are used to gather information on various materials, substances, and objects. It is the hope of local politicians, the university leadership, material scientists in Lund, and many others that the two facilities will help establish Lund as a global heavyweight in materials science for many years to come.
Regional dreams In order to work towards the dream of turning Lund into a world-leading site for materials science research, MAX IV and the ESS will not stand alone in the fields of Brunnshรถg. There are plans to construct a Science Village between the two facilities, which is intended to be home to many smaller businesses and research labs that will ideally take advantage of the findings coming out of the ESS and MAX IV and convert them into new products. Regional planners hope that when completely developed, Brunnshรถg will offer a mix of businesses, schools (from kindergarten and up), and parks, and become a city district where more than 50,000 people will live and work. Anticipating this, the plan is for Brunnshรถg to be linked to central Lund by a new tram system. There are, in other words, very large aspirations associated with the role Big Science can play in helping to develop Lund and the surrounding ร resund region. Although to some extent relying on theoretical underpinnings, the localized knowledge spillovers, as Josephine Rekers shows in her chapter, will be inherently uncertain, unanticipated, and non-linear. Even when multibillion-Euro 14
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investments are made, they do not directly and predictably lead to successful outputs, but are instead tied to the degree of the facility’s embeddedness in regional knowledge networks that facilitate localized learning. The Öresund region itself (comprising eastern Denmark and south-western Sweden, centred on the Copenhagen–Elsinore and Malmö–Lund–Helsingborg nexuses) was more or less ‘born’ in July 2000 with the opening of the Öresund Bridge, a fixed link for car and railway traffic (Berg & Löfgren 2000, 7). Prior to that date it was only possible to cross the Sound between Denmark and Sweden by boat, but with the construction of the bridge travelling times between Lund and Copenhagen were reduced from a couple of hours to little more than thirty minutes. Bridge use has steadily increased since its opening, going from 3,000 vehicular crossings per day in 2000 to 19,000 crossings per day in 2011 (Øresundsbro Konsortiet 2011, 4). The Öresund region is host to a number of large research universities. Copenhagen University and Lund University are the main players, and have also been framed as having a special role in spurring the growth of the region through the development of knowledge-based businesses, set up under the auspices of the two universities or in close organizational and geographical proximity to them. All of this organizational work has to be done by interested local actors (as in the Danish–Swedish collaboration on the life science cluster ‘Medicon Valley’), since there is no political body that actually governs the region; nonetheless, it was clear by mid-2012 that local politicians on both sides of the bridge had vested their hopes in the possibility that the ESS would facilitate regional economic growth that would be felt on both sides of the Sound. Denmark for its part promised to own and finance 25 per cent of the ESS; it was duly announced that the computing facilities necessary for interpreting the data produced by the ESS would be located in Copenhagen. These factors were obviously important in encouraging Danish commitment to the project. Strikingly, however, Danish interest in the ESS seems to have faded quickly once it moved beyond the political sphere and the daily lives of those whose jobs would be directly affected by the ESS. As Markus Idvall has observed in a preliminary study, 15
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the Danish media coverage of the ESS has been quite sparse, and consequently most Danes know very little, if anything, about the planned facility.1 The situation is in some ways different in Sweden, but there are parallels. As it turns out, the ESS has awoken a great deal of media interest on the Swedish side of the Sound, but as Tobias Linné explains in his contribution to this volume, it has been very local. The national papers, which are based in Stockholm, have demonstrated very little interest in the ESS, and when they have published information about the facility, it has tended to come at the same time as when local curiosity has been at its peak—in the months preceding the May 2009 agreements to locate the ESS in Lund. To a certain extent, the Danish lack of curiosity parallels the national tendency in Sweden; here it is interesting to see how, when it comes to materials science, Big Science has the ability to capture the public’s imagination locally, but much less so nationally or internationally. In contrast, the Big Science of space travel— whether it is the success of Mars landings or the tragedies of the space shuttle saga—seems to be a guaranteed crowd-puller at the national level (and perhaps only to a slightly lesser degree internationally). Clearly, there are not only very different kinds of Big Science, but they seem to convey very different forms of cultural resonance that can tickle the public imagination. In the case of the ESS, it is interesting to see how something that most people find very difficult to understand (be it particle physics, or materials science, or the ESS itself ) can stir up the dreams, hopes, fears, and ambitions of local populations. As Tom O’Dell points out in his contribution to this volume, the ESS may not exist, and may never exist, but it is nonetheless already changing the shape and development of the Öresund region. New roads and hotels are being built. The dreams of a plethora of local entrepreneurs have been set in motion, and the environmental fears of some of the region’s citizens have caused politicians and regional authorities to take action. Particle physics and materials science may be difficult to understand, but more than being a problem, their complexity (and the ambiguities of what they may and may not be capable of achieving) might even function as an opening for culturally creative 16
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processes as various actors view the facility, and the region they see in its future reflection (or shadow), in very different lights. For politicians, the hope is that all of this will lead to economic and regional growth. But what will grow and what will not are very different questions. Josephine Rekers uses her chapter to outline the multiple issues that regional planners and local politicians are going to have to take into consideration if they are to succeed in realizing their dreams. There are no guarantees that an investment of billions of Euros in two huge facilities in Lund will lead to any growth at all. There is always the risk that these two facilities will become little more than isolated islands on the outskirts of Lund, attracting a few thousand scientists each year, but little else. As Rekers argues, geography does matter (and proximity to these types of facilities may very well have benefits) but in an age of digital media, geography is going to have to be managed carefully, and there are lessons to learn from other parts of the world, as Rekers points out. After all, the ESS is a multinational project, and it is not always easy to coordinate the visions and ambitions of competing nation-states in a manner that is necessarily beneficial for the local community or its growth.
The history of a user facility Focusing on the ESS, however, it is clear that since the early 1990s this project has constantly been driven by different visions. As Thomas Kaiserfeld shows in this volume, European neutron scientists managed to engage policymakers, especially after the OECD ministerial conference in 1999 endorsed the building of neutron spallation sources in Japan, the US, and Europe as the basis for a global strategy for neutron-based research. In the US, this was later realized in the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and in Japan as the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC). The next year after the OECD endorsement, the Ă–resund Bridge opened. Dreams of a connected Ă–resund region between Sweden and Denmark started to take shape more or less immediately (Idvall 2000; LĂśfgren 2008), and it did not seem farfetched to Danish and Swedish neutron scientists on both sides of the Sound to suggest the siting of the ESS in Lund. 17
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If general regional development is one of many keys to understanding the locating of the ESS to Lund, a number of existing European research facilities may help us understand the reasons for a European neutron spallation source, beyond the 1999 global strategy for neutron-based research. First and foremost among these is, of course, CERN, where ground-breaking research on particle physics has been conducted since the 1950s, an often-cited example of successful European research collaboration where national resources have been pooled to make possible science facilities inconceivable for a single European country (Hermann et al. 1987–96). This has been achieved not least through CERN’s repeated expansions, for instance the proposed CERN II in the 1960s (Widmalm 1993). As Hallonsten observes (p. 63, n. 10), there have indeed been quite a few instances, with varying rates of success. One important obstacle to their realization, evident from Kaiserfeld’s contribution, has been the trouble the European partner countries have had in agreeing on everything to do with Big Science, from location, joint planning, and facility management to the details of the instruments to be used. No matter the size, such projects can only be achieved by pooling resources, and for that to be possible, there has to be discussion—and agreement. Another important source of conflict concerns the matter of which experiments to do and which research groups should be allowed to do them, as well as specifically allotting the distribution of beamtime (Hallonsten 2012). Normally, beamtime is allocated to groups selected through a process of application and peer review. However, it is never the case that all the beamtime available is allocated in a straight peer-review process; instead, some beamtime is reserved to be allocated at the discretion of the facility management, and some of it is usually sold to commercial research interests. Often enough, additional principles may make the allocation of beamtime even more complicated, such as the principle of fair return, guaranteeing that researchers from partner countries of the facility are allocated beamtime proportional to the national contributions. Systems for the allocation of beamtime make evident Big Science facilities’ function as user facilities, in the sense that they are primarily used by research groups who only spend a limited time there doing their 18
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experiments and gathering data before returning to their respective home institutions, a characteristic which is also shown by the interaction between instrumentation designers and potential users as described in Sandell’s chapter. In the distribution of beamtime for different purposes, we find one of the many interesting aspects of user facilities like the ESS and MAX IV, namely that they simultaneously support application-driven and curiosity-driven research. This is analysed further in Höög’s contribution, where she uses the term ‘technoscience’ for the combination of both these types of research, which the ESS claims it will promote. At the heart of her analysis is the question of which features at facilities like the ESS can be claimed to be novel, and which are instances of continuing research practices that can be traced back to the Enlightenment or even before. Questions concerning the research practices of Big Science are obviously crucial, as is the manner in which scientists at Big Science facilities perceive their own work or their relationship to the facility in which they work. Employing detectors to measure the behaviour of neutrons as they pass through different materials, and then utilizing sophisticated computer systems to analyse the data obtained from a series of tests, may sound like a very rational process. But behind the science, there are always international teams of researchers who have to plan and work together. In order for a Big Science facility to be as productive as possible, it is important to understand how scientists identify with their work (and workplaces), how they collaborate, and how they communicate as they plan and conduct their work, and ultimately discuss their findings. It may be impossible to answer these types of question in relation to a facility that does not yet exist, but by working comparatively, both von Platen and Olander, in their respective chapters, have sought partial answers by turning their attention to the ongoing activities at the MAX IV Laboratory (the name given to the organization running both the existing MAX-lab and the MAX IV project which will result in the new MAX IV). In her chapter, von Platen shows how the members of a Big Science laboratory under transition very much understand their organizational identity in terms of external communication, which 19
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thus reflects on the organization itself. Since messages designed and communicated to a wider public also influence organizational identity, an important conclusion for further analyses of transitional Big Science organizations is that the distinctions between internal and external communication may be hard to maintain. While von Platen’s study concerns the MAX IV Laboratory as a whole, Olander uses the existing facilities at MAX-lab to study how social media influences research practices. Her analysis shows that, even though these research teams may be working with cutting-edge equipment and experiments, they prefer traditional forms of communication such as email, telephones, or face-to-face interaction. Instead, social media tools developed for project management and collaboration are more often used for leisure purposes. Max Liljefors, in turn, analyses the creation of a collective image of the ESS built on certain rhetorical and aesthetic tropes drawn from the realms of fiction and science fiction. Using the YouTube videos in circulation, Liljefors shows how they communicate both the adventurous exploration of the unknown and its harmonious merging with the known. The image of MAX IV together with ESS as two facilities well integrated into Skåne’s landscape (see Figure 7 and 8 in colour section 2) is perhaps the best presentation of this integration of the unknown with the known (at least to people living locally). In his analysis, Liljefors enlarges on Wilhelm Agrell’s work (2012a), which shows how ESS reports and brochures produced between 2006 and 2009 were one step in the ongoing medialization of science. Liljefors’s chapter should also be read in the context of von Platen’s analysis of organizational identity, and her demonstration of the close interaction between internal and external communication at the MAX IV Laboratory. If one applies Liljefors’s reasoning, clearly the organizational identity of a Big Science facility such as the ESS relies on elements drawn from both fiction and science fiction. Take Liljefors’s and von Platen’s studies with Sandell’s, and one recognizes an attempt to communicate the boldness of the instrumentation design groups to a wider audience, given an organizational identity that is influenced by the communication of fiction and science-fiction tropes. In fact, even the aspects of the ESS highlighted by Höög, such as the technoscientific claims for the social uses of the 20
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research to be pursued, may contribute to the supposed boldness of the design groups. Admittedly, such chain reasoning should not be taken as a fact, but rather as hypotheses for future research to explore in greater detail. The hopes for the ESS—its potential attraction to researchers from all over the world, and the anticipated facts and technologies to be generated by experiments using the ESS’s unique instruments—have their downside. In his chapter on the dismantling of Big Science facilities around the world, Holmberg notes how they often live on in new guises once they are past their use-by date for scientific research, for instance as science museums or higher-education resources. Interestingly, there are now already plans and calculations for the decommissioning of the ESS after forty years of use. Holmberg connects this forward-looking stance to environmentalists’ protests at the extensive use of mercury as the target material (now exchanged for tungsten) and the inefficiency of locating the ESS on some of Sweden’s best arable land (Agrell 2012; Stenborg & Klintman 2012), as well as to Swedish nuclear safety regulations, which require building permit applications for facilities involving radioactivity to include credible decommissioning plans. Of course, these perspectives on the ESS stand in stark contrast to the more futuristic tropes that make up today’s vision of it, before even the first prime agricultural sod has been turned.
The research team and the ESS A few words about the research team behind this book. Naturally, one of the central factors in our work leading up to the production of this book was the 2009 negotiations that led to the agreement to locate the ESS in Lund. Not all of the contributors to this volume are necessarily Big Science scholars per se, but all in their own way realized that the decision to construct such a large facility in Lund would have a significant impact on the university where they work, the town of Lund, and the Öresund region at large. Beyond this, when the agreements concerning the ESS’s possible location in Lund were reached in 2009, the political climate was tightly focused on research that would lead to new innova21