Collins has taken as his subject the search for gravitational radiation. Collins is a distinguished sociologist, and in Gravity's Shadow he demonstrates why it is important to go beyond superficial characterizations of science to study how groups of scientists actually work together and make decisions. It is, then, very timely that Harry Collins has written a first-class study of how contemporary experimental physics operates. The list of new particles or effects that have been looked for-and so far not found-is longer: the Higgs particle, supersymmetric particles, dark-matter particles, proton decay, the fifth force, evidence of extra dimensions.
But the only major addition to our knowledge of the elementary particles these past two decades was the discovery that neutrinos have mass. The fields that have continued to amaze are astronomy and cosmology, which are obviously healthy. Given enough resources, how could this approach fail? And, although you wouldn't know it from the popular literature, hundreds of millions of dollars a year are spent on experimental physics-much more than is spent on theory.īut despite the several billions invested in particle accelerators and detectors, there have been few truly major experimental discoveries in fundamental physics in the past 20 years. After all, experiment is a simple thing: Just as in high school, you follow the procedure, and you either get the result predicted by the theory you are testing or you don't. Thus it is worrying that these days many theorists spend their whole careers on ideas that are untested experimentally.īut if all is not well with theory, at least experiment must be healthy. The whole point of science-and the feature to which it owes all its success-is that no idea is to be believed until it has been rigorously tested by experiment.
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