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April 14, 2011 12:50 pm PDT

The scientist who studies scientists—An interview with Harry Collins

Who watches the watchmen? Harry Collins. That's who. A professor of social sciences at Cardiff University in Great Britain, Collins has spent his career studying other scientists. In particular, Collins has spent more than 35 years following scientists who work in the field of gravitational wave physics. That's how I found out about him, during a dinner in February with several gravitational wave physicists who work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They kept talking about "our sociologist", who attended their meetings, took notes during their debates, and generally seemed to observe and record their behavior the way Jane Goodall did with chimpanzees. I was immediately intrigued, but Collins work turned out to be a lot more fascinating than I'd even guessed. What he does isn't simple ethnography, or even real-time recording of science history. Instead, Collins uses his observations of gravitational wave physicists and their internal culture to better understand how science, as a human endeavor, works—how researchers go about learning new information, how we use science as a tool to arrive at truth, and what happens when scientists disagree with one another. In the process, he's become one of the world's leading experts on decision-making, how science and politics work together, and even the nature of expertise, itself....


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