Andrew Pickering

Who is Andrew Pickering?

Andrew Pickering is a sociologist, philosopher and historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of London, and a doctorate in Science Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His book Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics is a classic in the field of the sociology of science.

In elucidating some of the sociological factors prevailing in particle physics, Pickering also wrote a number of papers for journals and conferences. According to Pickering, theory and experiment come in packages, and traditions of experiment generate just the kind of data which will fuel further theorising, while traditions of theory generate new problems for further development.

Pickering thus described two theoretical frameworks in particle physics: 'old physics' – which at the time of its death, was "still alive" – dominated high energy physics through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, and concerned itself with 'common [particle physics] phenomena'.