Split And Splice (a Phenomenology Of Experimentation)

By (author) Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg
Description:
An esteemed historian of science explores the diversity of scientific experimentation.
 
The experiment has long been seen as a test bed for theory, but in Split and Splice, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger makes the case, instead, for treating experimentation as a creative practice. His latest book provides an innovative look at the experimental protocols and connections that have made the life sciences so productive.
 
Delving into the materiality of the experiment, the first part of the book assesses traces, models, grafting, and note-taking—the conditions that give experiments structure and make discovery possible. The second section widens its focus from micro-level laboratory processes to the temporal, spatial, and narrative links between experimental systems. Rheinberger narrates with accessible examples, most of which are drawn from molecular biology, including from the author’s laboratory notebooks from his years researching ribosomes.
 
A critical hit when it was released in Germany, Split and Splice describes a method that involves irregular results and hit-or-miss connections—not analysis, not synthesis, but the splitting and splicing that form a scientific experiment. Building on Rheinberger’s earlier writing about science and epistemology, this book is a major achievement by one of today’s most influential theorists of scientific practice.
Table of contents:

List of Figures

Introduction
 

Part I Infra-Experimentality

1 Traces

2 Models

3 Making Visible

4 Grafting

5 Protocols
 

Part II Supra-Experimentality

6 Shapes of Time

7 Experimental Cultures

8 Knowing and Narrating

9 Thinking Wild

10 A Eulogy of the Fragment

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Names

Review quote:
“Split and Slice borrows new perspectives from a broad range of scholarly fields, generating a long list of cited authors who are rarely associated in the same book. Rheinberger moves easily from phenomenology to biology and from science to art, and vice versa. . . . The book is in a way exhaustive, addressing many of the most significant issues discussed in science studies during the last decades, for instance the importance of practice and technologies, the rich source of information represented by notebooks, and in par­ticular the protocols shared by the different members of a laboratory. Only Rheinberger could write such a book, which wanders between phenomenology and sociology of science, while still remaining engaging and attractive.”
Review quote:
“What''s in an experiment? In this English edition of Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation, a leading historian and philosopher of biology returns in fine form to renew his long-standing plea for scholarly attention to the human and material elements shaping experimentation in the life sciences. In this book, Rheinberger again pulls from the primary literature with which he is most familiar, that in molecular biology, to probe how both research materials and researchers'' encounters with them, through experiments, shape the emergence of scientific knowledge. . . . There is much of interest to the working biologist in Split and Splice. Rheinberger offers a convincing way of characterizing the biologist''s role in her craft: She is the mediator between the real and the written; between the world of the living and the books and papers that, eventually, report new discoveries.”
Review quote:
“A highly original, systematically organized, and empirically enriched essay on scientific experimentation. . . . While its first part convinces with a precise and logically ordered analysis, the second part leads through a broad variety of philosophical thoughts