CONCEPT
The Gravitational Wave Physics Community
The scientific community Collins embedded himself in for over four decades — the empirical ground from which his theories of collective tacit knowledge, interactional expertise, and the experimenter's regress were built, and the test bed on which his framework has been repeatedly validated.
The gravitational wave physics community is not merely a case study in Collins's work — it is the primary laboratory from which his sociological framework was developed. Beginning with fieldwork on Joseph Weber's early detector experiments in the 1970s, Collins followed the community through its forty-year search for the first gravitational wave detection, which LIGO confirmed in 2015. The ethnographic depth of the engagement — hundreds of interviews, attendance at countless conferences, decades of reading papers, continuous conversation with practitioners — gave Collins access to the social life of a scientific community that produces some of the most technically sophisticated experimental results in modern physics.
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Collins's major works on the community include Changing Order (1985), which established the experimenter's regress, Gravity's Shadow (2004), which documented the decades-long search for the first detection, and Gravity's Ghost and Big Dog