The integration and new constitution of objects of investigation in the interactional environment of the laboratory is, incidentally, connected with an increase in the possibilities of articulation. Interactional environments are temporally structured environments capable of acceleration, which are specified by the sequence of the changes in articulation of the participants.⁴
Because today, scattered over the whole world, researchers are linked up with observational and measurement data which are obtained from space, for instance by means of electronic transmission, then circulated and exchanged, it becomes possible to work simultaneously on a common 'knowledge front'.
It is an open question whether this extreme form of simultaneity built into the division of labour is a peculiarity of astronomy, for even Kepler offered Fabricius the use of his observational data in 1608 with the laconic question‘what if we cannot all do everything?'⁵ The builtin mechanism of competition also undoubtedly contributes to the acceleration of the generation of knowledge. But the really remarkable thing which results from the observations of the scientific laboratory is not so much the integration of the objects of investigation brought to the laboratory into the social temporality of the researchers, and into a work organization which strives for a division of labour with an approximative simultaneity, for in this respect the scientific research process resembles other industrial methods of production. The remarkable thing is rather not just that a separate space has arisen in the laboratory, linked by means of miniaturization and other techniques with distant, larger or smaller spaces in nature, but that a separate time-structure is created in the laboratory. Because it is possible to keep the objects of investigation continuously present in the procedural context of the laboratory, the temporal conditions of experimentation and possibilities of control over them are considerably extended. If the time-structures of an object become manipulable by experiment, its capacity for articulation increases. In the artificially producible present, other timescales become observable, sequences repeatable, processes possible to accelerate or slow down. In the laboratory, science creates its own time, which is not to be equated with the cultural forms of interaction'or the 'local temporality' of the researchers themselves. The laboratory time created for the investigation and interpretation of phenomena rather itself becomes a scientific and cultural construct, which begins to react upon the temporality of society at the latest when the objects of investigation, in however changed a form, leave the laboratory and continue to have an effect as artefacts in society. Laboratory time then brings its own need for time with it. This is directed, as in the laboratory itself, towards constant availability, accessibility and continuous presence.
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Cronos's Fear of the New Age