An instrument can hide many others: Or how multiple instruments grow into a polymorphic instrumentation

Abstract

The development of an instrument is often analysed in a rather heroic fashion, as though it had single-handedly brought about the evolution of a whole scientific field. But instruments can also be regrouped within a wider instrumentation, in which they may be regularly reconstructed and rearticulated in such a way as to serve many different scientific purposes. This flexibility has a cost, which is on one hand the task of reconstruction, and on the other the monitoring systems that must be designed in order to discover scientific perspectives with the greatest potential, and the instrumental set-ups to develop in order to implement them. This article analyses a rare and complex instrumentation – a synchrotron – to determine links between instruments, and types of organization behind the functioning and evolution of these links.

Computer Simulations as Scientific Instruments

“…In short, there are a multiplicity of heterogenous processes and components in a computer simulation. Nevertheless, as briefly explained above and will become clear in future sections of this dissertation, that this is the case does not exclude these simulations from being treated as a single product (Simoulin, 2017), an artifact whose reliability and epistemic role cannot be assessed in the same way we asses other instruments. Rather, as instruments, they integrate many straightforward and single model simulations and produce a somewhat intelligible presentation of the aggregated product.…”

“…This description is meant to further elucidate the tangible constraints as well as the artifactual nature of computer simulations. As I will show further below, this description also points towards the fact that complex devices, which are constituted by a multiplicity of other devices and require a broad range of experts to carry out a unified function, can also be singled out as single independent artifacts in and of themselves (Simoulin, 2017).…”

“…They are also not like medicine because, even intuitively, one can see that computer simulations are closer to devices used in medicine than they are to the practice as a whole. 19 What is clear from the complexity and size of contemporary scientific projects such as those involving the creation of a computer simulation, is that these instruments, like many modern instruments, often encapsulate multiple components and various functions all at once (Simoulin, 2017). 20 For example, a weather prediction model simulation is a simulation whose expected function is, of course, to allow insight into the behavioral patterns of a system: namely the weather.…”

“…They are also sufficiently distinct from conventional instruments. A second set of arguments in this dissertation will argue that like other composite instruments (Simoulin, 2017) such as the synchrotron, which is an instrument made of many instruments, computer simulations are the kind of instrument made of many instruments.…”

“…That is, if we take heterogeneity of expertise, components and implications, as a basis to deny that something is an instrument, then many of the things we would intuitively deem to be instruments will fail the test. This is because many modern instruments require such heterogeneity to be what they are and do what they do (Simoulin, 2017). This is not only the case for modern instruments, however.…”