Collisions and Collaboration: The Organization of Learning in the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

by Max H. Boisot (Editor), Markus Nordberg, Said Yami

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level, the terascale, at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view.

The kind of "big science" being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of "big science" by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of "interlaced" knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of "big science"; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting.

This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust--and where "big science" can head next.

Genres: Science, Management

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2011

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Collisions and Collaboration* is a fascinating collection of essays, masterminded by the late Max Boisot, that seeks to understand the organizational infrastructure that supported the most ambitious and expensive scientific experiment undertaken ever. The ATLAS detector is a crucial element in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. This piece of machinery was instrumental in 'discovering' the Higgs boson. Just a few facts to underline the scope of the undertaking: the ATLAS detector weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower and contains 10 million functional elements. Scientists had to achieve fundamental breakthroughs in three interrelated technological areas: 1) never-achieved collision energy and luminosity, 2) unparallelled event detection rates, and 3) data acquisition and processing to match. In operational conditions the guiding magnets operate at a temperature of -271°C. The pressure inside the LHC is 10-13 atmosphere, 1/10 of the pressure on the moon. 40 million snapshots per second (!) are taken, each with an image resolution of 100 megapixels. ATLAS involved 3.000 scientists, spread across 173 institutes, in 38 countries. The numbers are mind boggling indeed.

But how did the scientists pull this off? What kind of organization and management concept would help to turn this wild ambition into reality. Max Boisot, who edited this book, was a polymath who developed an elegant and powerful theory of how various types of organizations deal with information management. These concepts are fruitfully applied to understanding the information metabolism that underpinned the ATLAS experiment. The insights go against the grain of much of conventional management wisdom. No hanging on to master plans here but a delicate process of putting together a non-linear, multi-dimensional puzzle of interdependent pieces brought together on the basis of fluid and changeable concepts. Organizationally this operated as a project adhocracy avant la lettre. There was no CEO to oversee the whole operation but a 'spokesperson' who facilitated emergent technical leadership through a continuous review process guided by rational justification and consensual choice of design options. These are just a few elements of a very rich and nuanced picture of this high-performing organization that emerges from these essays.

Altogether this is a fascinating case study of how clever human beings deal with high stakes in the context of significant uncertainty and organizational complexity. I use this material often in my classes on systems thinking, exploring the parallels with David Turnbull's account of the construction of Chartres cathedral (as developed in his 'Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers').