What constitutes a “scientific instrument” has changed over time (see Liba Taub’s survey in Isis, December 2011), and in Image and Logic (1997) Peter Galison argued that the instrumentation of 20th century microphysics should be understood as a quasi-autonomous subculture, interplaying with experimentation and theory. While CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is often described as “the world’s largest scientific instrument”, it can also be viewed as a complex of many individual instruments, which were developed and built in different academic and commercial institutions around the world (for first-hand accounts of the process, see Lyndon Evans, The Large Hadron Collider: a Marvel of Technology, 2009). The design, construction and operation of the LHC provides a rich array of opportunities to study international trade in instruments and transfer of knowledge in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This talk will ‘zoom in’ on some of the instruments that make up small parts of the whole LHC, exploring their development and integration into the wider system at CERN, and examine how the people who have designed, built and used them have blurred disciplinary boundaries during long careers in accelerator and detector physics.

I will also provide a brief preview of the Science Museum’s forthcoming exhibition on the LHC, which aims to go beyond traditional museum expositions of particle physics focussing solely on scientific principles, and explore the practices of working on the world’s largest scientific project.