On Listening in to the Scientific Mundane

Abstract

Scientific discovery often makes for a spectacular image or news story, as recent photographs of Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way, evidence. However, the mundane processes of scientific research, with their bureaucratic nuances, unsolvable conundrums, small talk, reporting, meetings, and seemingly inconsequential details, are often undocumented. Between January 2022 – May 2023 Rebecca Collins was artist-in-residence in B14, an office at the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Throughout the residency period she listened in to the mundane rhythms, atmospheres, and affects circulating among those who are trying to understand what took place in the first three minutes of our universe. She dedicated the majority of her efforts to listening in to dark matter – at once an ongoing scientific conundrum and totally mundane substance.

In Spain, international teams of physicists use specifically designed technological apparatus and laboratories to look for dark matter, an abundant yet elusive undetected particle present in our everyday lives. Field notes from visits to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, situated below the Pyrenees mountains, and the Laboratory of Acoustics for the Detection of Astroparticles, positioned 2.5 kilometres below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea serve to further reflect on the process-driven efforts of research into new physics. Anecdotes and autoethnographic writing from the situated and subjective experience of the author aims to understand how institutions and individuals dedicated to the investigation of new physics enable the extraordinary and the utterly mundane to coexist. Ultimately, the article considers how interdisciplinary encounters, anecdotes, conversations and site-based accounts constitute a practice-based research methodology that strives for collective practices of uncertainty, and a politics of indeterminacy.

Notes

1 Funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Early Career Fellowship (2022–3), grant no. 1897.

2 A neutrino observatory, the first detector of its kind, is situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Thousands of spherical optical sensors sit underneath the ice, at depths from 1.45 metres to 2.45 metres below the surface, searching for almost massless subatomic particles

3 For Stolen Voices (2014–21) eavesdropping is both subject and methodology of the research. Fieldwork in the form of site explorations and the practice of eavesdropping is combined with research into social, political and economic dynamics at the borders and margins of the UK. See Collins and Linsley (forthcoming)

4 Causality is traditionally understood as cause and effect. Karen Barad, drawing on the work of Niels Bohr and Judith Butler, rethinks this conventional binary view in her theory of ‘intra-action’ whereby human and non-human entities exist in entangled, complex ecologies (2007).

5 While gravitational evidence for Dark Matter dates back to early astrophysical and cosmological observations, its particle nature is yet to be proven. The history of dark matter detection techniques is still being written.

6 The ‘Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning’ study group is linked to the research project ‘The New Loss of Centre. Critical practices of live arts and architecture in the Anthropocene’, directed by Fernando Quesada. PID2019-105045GB-100.