ABSTRACT
For early modern scientists, printed texts created "immutable mobiles" (Latour, 1990) that could be studied, compared, and synthesized to produce new knowledge.8 Print offered certainty because it was repeatable, reproducible, and verifiable. Printed texts helped scientists organize and make sense of the scattered and fragmented incunabula that had previously documented the material and institutional histories of late medieval Europe. Latour (1990) writes: "No 'new man' suddenly emerged sometime in the sixteenth century, and there are no mutants with larger brains working inside modern laboratories who can think differently from the rest of us."9 Instead, particle physics "must be" radically different from folk biology because print enables scientists to create stable images that maintain [the] internal consistency of the object regardless of perspective. 10
ticesandintellectualactivityinmanydisciplines.Butcontemporarywriters stillwrestlewiththeuncertaintyofpersonalobservationandexperience whentheycreateregulationsandprocedurestoprotectthehealthandsafety ofworkers.
