Channeling creativity by addressing constraints: Technical review and...

The talk focuses on the practices of technical review for the particle detector hardware in the context of the ATLAS detector upgrade. Technical review is a variant of peer review applied to technology construction and a feature of internal governance of a scientific collaboration such as the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s LHC during the detector upgrade.

While peer review in journals or grant boards is sometimes understood as hindering creativity (Stanford 2019, Alvarez 1987), I show, in contrast, how technical review emerges as an arena for channeling creativity by collaboratively identifying, managing, and negotiating constraints. Since the upgrade design solutions are both path dependent (i.e. constrained by the initial design of the detector) and clearly goal oriented (towards the planned physics performance and objectives), the range of the upgrade design solutions is rather narrow, yet requires creativity in navigating the multiple requirements while finding the best solutions.

The assessment of the hardware specifications, construction methods and schedules, test results, and prototypes falls into the domain of a four-staged internal technical review: specifications review, preliminary design, final design, and production readiness review. These are meetings where the construction team meets a group of internal ATLAS reviewers to present, discuss, and get feedback and approval (or disapproval) of the status and plans for the development of a particular hardware component. The choice of reviewers reflects the need to identify constraints such as interfaces to other components or data quality concerns, while the presence of management representatives monitors and approves the review results based on a bird eye view alignment with the other ongoing upgrade activities and plans. The exchange that happens in these meetings portrays a picture of creativity facilitated by constraints rather than hindered by them, akin to what Pickering calls a process of resistance and accommodation (1995). The talk is based on semi-structured interviews with physicists and engineers involved in the ATLAS technical reviews.

References

Alvarez, L. W. (1987), The adventure of a physicist. New York: Basic Books.

Pickering, A. (1995), The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency, and Science. University of Chicago Press.

Stanford, K. (2019), “Unconceived alternatives and conservativism in science: the impact of professionalisation, peer-review, and Big Science”, Synthese 196: 3915-32.