Down to the wire: The cultural clock of physicists and the discourse of consensus

This study examines how deadlines and time limits for conference talks organize the discourse of consensus among collaborating experimental and theoretical physicists in a university laboratory Six months of videotaped observations, including two cycles of conference talk preparation, indicate that, as the date of an upcoming conference nears, several things happen (a)Co-authoring physicists usually have not achieved agreement on all aspects of the findings (b)They nevertheless direct their energies to constructing a hybrid presentation rhetoric that satisfies the co-authors and fits the talk to the official conference talk time limit (c) In the process of working through matters of rhetoric – what to say, what to display visually, what to leave out, and in what order the information should be presented – the physicists construct a working consensus on matters of physics theory and experimental data explaining the properties and dynamics of the physical universe (Scientific discourse, consensus, temporal organization, rhetoric )