Name Sharon Traweek Books Beamtimes and lifetimes | ||
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Major works Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists Alma mater University of California, Santa Cruz | ||
Main interests Gender studies, History | ||
Sharon Jean Traweek is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies and History at University of California, Los Angeles.
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Her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, which explores the social structures of particle physicists, has been cited in a number of books relating to the sociology of science. In it she critical of how much time is spent by male physicists talking about the particle detector's which they had to build rather than focusing on the results that the detectors produced.
When experimentalists present papers at seminars and conferences, they always begin with a detailed description of their detector and devote at least a third of their talks to these machines before introducing the data generated in their experiments and reporting how those data were analyzed in order to produce "curves" (interpretations which have an acceptable degree of "fit" with the data). [...] It is the theorist who is more likely to see detectors as scientific instruments which simply record nature, as transcription devices which themselves leave no trace.
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge criticized her comments as being illustrative of the anti-scientific biases in feminism, e.g. Traweek's genital metaphorizing of scientific instruments at SLAC.