Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists

The author, who at one point was employed to conduct public tours of the facilities at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), is presently Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. She reports here, in language easily accessible to general readers (but with the detailed notes and references required of scholars), the results of protracted "field work" which she did first (to gain objectivity) at KEK (a Japanese counterpart to SLAC) and then at SLAC. Her intent, presuming those two laboratories to be in important respects "typical," is to describe the life-styles and "tribal rites" characteristic of the "world of high-energy physicists" (by which she mainly means experimental high-energy physicists). Of interest at least to anthropologists and to such physicists as like to read about themselves. A better book might have resulted had the author felt less constrained to honor the canonical methodological and conceptual conventions of anthropology, less content to be merely descriptive of the natives; there are identifiable and interesting reasons physicists tend to act in the ways here described. (NW) Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.