  According to Peter Galison, the coordination of different ``subcultures''
within a scientific field happens through local exchanges within ``trading
zones''. In his view, the workability of such trading zones is not guaranteed,
and science is not necessarily driven towards further integration. In this
paper, we develop and apply quantitative methods (using semantic, authorship,
and citation data from scientific literature), inspired by Galison's framework,
to the case of the disunity of high-energy physics. We give prominence to
supersymmetry, a concept that has given rise to several major but distinct
research programs in the field, such as the formulation of a consistent theory
of quantum gravity or the search for new particles. We show that ``theory'' and
`phenomenology'' in high-energy physics should be regarded as distinct
theoretical subcultures, between which supersymmetry has helped sustain
scientific ``trades''. However, as we demonstrate using a topic model, the
phenomenological component of supersymmetry research has lost traction and the
ability of supersymmetry to tie these subcultures together is now compromised.
Our work supports that even fields with an initially strong sentiment of unity
may eventually generate diverging research programs and demonstrates the
fruitfulness of the notion of trading zones for informing quantitative
approaches to scientific pluralism.
