Down to the wire: The cultural clock of physicists and the discourse of consensus

This study examines how deadlines and time limits for conference talks organize the discourse of consensus among collaborating experimental and theoretical physicists in a university laboratory Six months of videotaped observations, including two cycles of conference talk preparation, indicate that, as the date of an upcoming conference nears, several things happen (a) Co-authoring physicists usually have not achieved agreement on all aspects of the findings (b) They nevertheless direct their energies to constructing a hybrid presentation rhetoric that satisfies the co-authors and fits the talk to the official conference talk time limit (c) In the process of working through matters of rhetoric - what to say, what to display visually, what to leave out, and in what order the information should be presented - the physicists construct a working consensus on matters of physics theory and experimental data explaining the properties and dynamics of the physical universe (Scientific discourse, consensus, temporal organization, rhetoric )* Every community constructs and attends to temporal orders (Whorf 1956, Heidegger 1962, Bourdieu 1977, Zerubavel 1981, Ricoeur 1988, Avem 1989, Gell 1992), and scientific communities are no exception Career schedules, project cycles, conference deadlines, and conference talk time slots, among other temporal orders, form the cultural clock of working scientists Time is thus not only an object that scientists measure, it is also a cultural artifact that organizes their work and discourse This essay examines how the cultural clock of physicists is marshaled to achieve consensus in one research laboratory While other studies of science emphasize that coming to consensus closure on a claim depends on AVAILABILITY of resources - namely techno-scientific equipment, a large skilled laboratory staff, and funding to conduct extensive research' - the present ethnographic study