A gripping look at gravitational wave research and what it says about scientific discovery and the future of the scientific community."This fine book pairs exploratory analysis with the pulse of a detective story. Giving a portrait of the way a community chose to test itself on the threshold of new knowledge, Collins offers the rich sociological insight that can only be won from uncommon experience, from a long-standing dialogue with the community he studie...

"In part an account of sociological fieldwork among scientists in the field and part astronomy-history mystery. . . . a terrific read." — NatureGravity's Ghost and Big Dog brings to life science's efforts to detect cosmic gravitational waves. These ripples in space-time are predicted by general relativity, and their discovery will not only demonstrate the truth of Einstein's theories but also transform astronomy. Although no gravitational wave has ...

Western democracies are suffering from populism, verging on fascism, because of the erosion of truth. This book argues that truth can grow out of citizenship education in how science really works, allied with an explicit culture of truth among politicians.While science operates outside the timescale of politics, it can serve as an object lesson for political decision-making under democracy. Using the examples of disease prevention and climate change, Harry Collins ...

What can humans do? What can machines do? How do humans delegate actions to machines? In this book, Harry Collins and Martin Kusch combine insights from sociology and philosophy to provide a novel answer to these increasingly important questions.The authors begin by distinguishing between two basic types of intentional behavior, which they call polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. Polimorphic actions (such as writing a love letter) are ones that community members expect to vary wi...

The rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on the legitimacy of scientific expertise in political decision making. This book explores the differences between populism and pluralist democracy and their relationship with science. Pluralist democracy is characterised by respect for minority choices and a system of checks and balances that prevents power being concentrated in one group, while populism treats minorities as traitorous so as to concentrate power in the government. The bo...

**Written in real time, this fascinating account takes you inside a landmark scientific discovery, long in the making: the first detection of gravitational waves.“Thrilling like a spy story.” —Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics**Scientists have been trying to confirm the existence of gravitational waves for more than 50 years. Then, in September 2015, came a “very interesting event” (as the cautious subject line in a physicist’s email read) tha...

How technologies can get it wrong in sports, and what the consequences are—referees undermined, fans heartbroken, and the illusion of perfect accuracy maintained.Good call or bad call, referees and umpires have always had the final say in sports. Bad calls are more visible: plays are televised backward and forward and in slow motion. New technologies—the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis and cricket, for example, and the goal-line technology used in English football—i...

A concise, accessible, and engaging guide for students and practitioners of sociology.In Forms of Life, Harry Collins offers an introduction to social science methodology, drawing on his forty-plus years of conducting high-profile sociological research. In this concise, accessible, and engaging book, Collins explains not only how to do sociology (the method) but also how to think about sociology (the meaning). For example, he describes the three activities...

In the very successful and widely discussed first volume in the Golem series, The Golem: What You Should Know about Science, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch likened science to the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology, a powerful creature which, while not evil, can be dangerous because it is clumsy. In this second volume, the authors now consider the Golem of technology. In a series of case studies they demonstrate that the imperfections in technology are related to the uncertainties in s...

An authoritative interdisciplinary account of the historic discovery of gravitational wavesIn 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the movement of large masses—as part of the theory of general relativity. A century later, researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed Einstein's prediction, detecting gravitational waves generated by the collision ...

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? In this remarkably clear and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among ...

A Nobel-winning physicist argues that fundamental physical laws are found not in the world of atoms, but in the macroscopic world around usIn this age of superstring theories and Big Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as impossibly distant from our everyday lives. But in A Different Universe, Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin argues that the scientific frontier is right under our fingers. Instead of looking for ultimate theories, Laughlin c...