Enculturation into Technoscience: Analysis of the Views of Novices and Experts on Modelling and Learning in Nanophysics

In physics, the borderline between pure science and technology is increasingly diffuse. Physics can be seen as technoscience, a merged scientific and technological enterprise. The notion of technoscience has emerged from studies in the philosophy of science and sociology of science, and also seems to arise quite naturally in discussions with practicing scientists and as an underpinning of actual scientific practices. Nanophysics, the activities of which are closely connected with the advancement of technology and where modelling and simulations are extensively used, is a natural place to test how the ideas contained in technoscience can be used to understand these central activities and how they are learned. The views of physicists, both experts and novices, working on modelling and simulation problems in nanophysics and nanotechnology are examined in this study using multidimensional methods, to discover their views on how knowledge in their research field is acquired, constructed and justified--and how novices are enculturated into these knowledge-construction processes. Additionally, attention is paid to the question of the skills that are needed and how these skills, alongside the views of modelling, develop as a novice becomes an expert. The need to understand these basic epistemological processes is quite apparent from the viewpoint of understanding science, as well as in terms of using this understanding to guide education. The results of the analysis strongly suggest that ideas characterising technoscience are also present in the practitioners' views; the technoscientific view can thus be used to understand and support the poorly understood process in which novices are enculturated as researchers in the field.