Harold Garfinkel founded the discipline called ethnomethodology, which is the empirical study of everyday practical activity. Like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Garfinkel found that meaning lives in interaction. But whereas they derived their conclusions from informal reflection on personal experience, ethnomethodology observes other people doing meaningful things in meticulous detail—typically through obsessive analysis of video tapes. Particularly interesting for me are the many ethnomethodological studies of laboratory scientists running experiments.