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Why your physics project needs an anthropologist
Jaco de Swart is a historian and anthropologist of science at the University of Cambridge, UK.
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The TAMBO team assesses suitable observatory sites in the Andes Mountains of Peru.Credit: Jaco de Swart
It is uncommon for a social scientist to have a seat at a meeting about an astronomical observatory, let alone for them to jointly lead one. For one-quarter of attendees to be social-science scholars is almost unprecedented. But that’s exactly what happens at meetings about the Tau Air-shower Mountain-based Observatory (TAMBO), a proposed detector to be built in the Peruvian Andes to look for cosmic particles called tau neutrinos.
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Tau neutrinos are elusive fundamental particles that are transmitted through space from black holes and other distant sources. When these particles interact with rocks on Earth, they can produce a shower of other, short-lived particles. The idea behind TAMBO is that if such a shower were emitted from one side of a deep canyon, it could be picked up by an array of 5,000 detectors on the other side (TAMBO collaboration. Nature Astron. 10, 947–951; 2026). The Andes Mountains of Peru contain many promising sites.
For those who live in the area, however, the case for TAMBO is less clear. The Andes are a sensitive ecological environment and home to Indigenous farming communities that consider the mountains sentient beings that are integral to their society. The area is also affected by legal and illegal mining, large-scale infrastructure projects and legacies of colonialism. This all leads to scepticism towards large projects that are developed by people from outside the area.
I am the co-principal investigator of the TAMBO collaboration, alongside Peruvian neutrino physicist Carlos Argüelles at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I lead the social-science and ‘responsible siting’ side of the project. Having received funding to build a proof-of-principle experiment called TAMBITO, we are searching for a potential location for the observatory.
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Since 2024, the TAMBO collaboration has built partnerships with 11 Peruvian institutions, which are involved in the design and development of the telescope. Scientific links are an important starting point, but they are not enough. No matter what their discovery potential is, big scientific experiments are not beneficial to everyone. For example, construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope has been stalled since 2015 because of protests triggered by objections to its planned site on Maunakea in Hawaii — a mountain that is sacred in Native Hawaiian culture.