Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2018 number 4

The social history of the proto-megascience experiments (an early stage of megascience) is studied in the framework of the generalized trading zone model through the example of the joint US-USSR accelerator-based experiments that tested the Regge theory with a supersonic gas-jet target at NAL near Chicago in 1970s. We attribute to proto-megascience the experiments that do not yet reach the scale of the developed megascience and, nevertheless, reveal certain its characteristic traits, such as a special role of political and institutional components as well as an alleviated role of the epistemic criteria for ending of experiments. The representation of experiment as a unity of sociopolitical, material, and theoretical components enables to consider it as a trading zone and apply to its analysis Galison’s and Collins’s generalized model of trading zones. Historical and archival materials allow to trace the changes in the structure of experiments and its evolution from coercive through fractionated to interlanguage, however, it is remarked that the last in the model transition to the subversive type is absent in the experiments analyzed due to the displacement of the Regge theory by the quark model in the scientific community. The applicability of the generalized model to the experiments supports the view that the consideration of the experiments as the trading zone is plausible. It is also noted that the absence of any changes in the object of study in the course of transition to proto-megascience points to community development as the driving force in the emergence of megascience.