Abstract
The debate between Collins and Franklin over the demise of the credibility of Joseph Weber’s gravitational wave claims has been treated as an iconic case of conflict over rival interpretations of the history of science (see, for example, Kinzel, this volume). Collins conducted contemporaneous interviews with the scientists and argued that the existence of the experimenter’s regress meant that scientists who generated results that conflicted with Weber were not forced to claim that he was wrong—a possible interpretation was that the critics’ experiments were less sound than Weber’s. Collins argued that the crucial intervention was made by a scientist whose rhetoric encouraged everyone to interpret Weber’s results, rather than their own, as flawed. Franklin drew largely on published sources and claimed that the accumulation of negative results was the inevitable outcome of rational processes. Collins and Franklin still disagree strongly about method and interpretation but the interesting thing discussed here is that, for them, the violence has gone out of the debate. In the early days they found themselves insulting each other but nowadays they find themselves cooperating in joint enterprises. This change reflects a change in the history of science: nowadays it is impossible to believe that there is no social component involved in the acceptance of scientific results so the disagreement between Franklin and Collins is no longer over deep epistemological principle but over methodological approach and their views concerning the intentions of different historical actors. This is the stuff of normal disagreement between historians rather than mutual incomprehension born of incommensurable approaches. The change in the tenor of the debate is a consequence of the fact that a revolution in historiography has taken place.
Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
Stoppard (1967)
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Notes
- 1.
This paper was written by Franklin who then invited Collins to be co-author. Collins agreed and made some small sub-edits and technical corrections accepted by Franklin. Where Collins thought that certain differences were revealing for the purposes of the exercise he added comments. Franklin and Collins reach a new agreement, and comment on remaining differences, in Sect. 6.5.
- 2.
- 3.
I exclude the humanities types, still fighting their anti-science corner in the two-cultures debate, trying to justify a radical post-modernism.
- 4.
This is in contrast to contributory expertise, the ability to participate and contribute to the science.
- 5.
In some of his other studies Franklin was a participant.
- 6.
As Holmes remarked to Watson, “How often have I told you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” (Conan Doyle 1967).
- 7.
This device is often referred to as a Weber bar.
- 8.
At this time, gravity waves were predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Just as an accelerated electrically charged particle will produce electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves, etc.), so should an accelerated mass produce gravitational radiation (gravity waves). Such radiation can be detected by the oscillations produced in a large mass when it is struck by gravity waves. Because the gravitational force is far weaker than the electromagnetic force, a large mass must be accelerated to produce a detectable gravity wave signal. (The ratio of the gravitational force between the electron and the proton in the hydrogen atom compared to the electrical force between them is \(4.38\times 10^{-40}\), a small number indeed.) The difficulty of detecting a weak signal is at the heart of this episode. There had been an earlier controversy about whether General Relativity did, in fact, predict gravitational radiation. For an excellent history of the theory of gravitational radiation, see Kennefick (2007); for a very interesting analysis of the detection of gravitational waves via the decay of a binary star system, for which a Nobel Prize was awarded, see Kennefick (2014).
- 9.
Given any such threshold there is a finite probability that a noise pulse will be larger than that threshold. The point is to show that there are pulses in excess of those expected statistically.
- 10.
In a later commentary on these early experiments, James Levine, who collaborated with Richard Garwin on one of these experiments, stated that it was this sidereal effect that was most important in persuading him, and others, to attempt the replications (Levine 2004). Levine’s commentary was not available when Collins and Franklin wrote their initial accounts.
- 11.
Collins, in some early work, offered two arguments concerning the difficulty, if not the virtual impossibility of replication.
Collins: I don’t understand this remark. I am engaged in analyzing the process and meaning of replication, not saying it is impossible. Some of the problems of what it means to replicate are discussed in Collins (1992, ch 2).
The first is philosophical. What does it mean to replicate an experiment? In what way is the replication similar to the original experiment? Franklin suggests that a rough and ready answer is that the replication measures the same physical quantity. Whether or not it, in fact, does so can, he believes, be argued for on reasonable grounds, as discussed earlier. Collins’ second argument is pragmatic. This is the fact that in practice it is often difficult to get an experimental apparatus, even one known to be similar to another, to work properly. Collins illustrates this with his account of Harrison’s attempts to construct two versions of a TEA leaser (Transverse Excited Atmospheric) (Collins 1985, pp. 51–78). Despite the fact that Harrison had previous experience with such lasers, and had excellent contacts with experts in the field, he had great difficulty in building the lasers. Hence, the difficulty of replication. Ultimately Harrison made the laser work after a series of adjustments. As Collins explains, “...in the case of the TEA laser the circle was readily broken. The ability of the laser to vaporize concrete, or whatever, comprised a universally agreed criterion of experimental quality. There was never any doubt that the laser ought to be able to work and never any doubt about when one was working and when it was not” (Collins 1985, p. 84).
- 12.
In this publication Collins maintains the anonymity of both the institutions and the experimenters. In later work, as we shall see he identifies one of the experimenters. Scientist Q is Richard Garwin.
- 13.
This point will be important in one of the criticisms made of Weber’s results and one that is cited by Franklin.
- 14.
Weber’s critics would disagree with that comment.
- 15.
Franklin’s discussion of some of the problems with Weber’s data analysis is given below.
- 16.
As we have seen Weber’s experiments on gravity waves were regarded as a failure. Weber later made a very speculative hypothesis concerning coherent neutrino scattering. For a discussion of how this hypothesis was treated, see Franklin (2010).
- 17.
The panel discussion on gravitational waves covers 56 pages, 243–298, in Shaviv and Rosen (1975). Tyson’s discussion of Garwin’s experiment occupies one short paragraph (approximately one quarter of a page) on p. 290.
- 18.
There is some anecdotal evidence that supports the view that Weber tuned his analysis procedures to maximize the signal. Collins suggests that Weber might have been influenced by Weber’s experience on a submarine chaser during World War II. In those circumstances a false positive results only in a few wasted depth charges, whereas missing a positive signal would have had fatal consequences. Collins quotes an unnamed physicist who stated, “Joe would come into the laboratory—he’d twist all the knobs until he finally got a signal. And then he’d take data. And then he would analyze the data: he would define what he would call a threshold. And he’d try different values for the thresholds. He would have algorithms for a signal—maybe you square the amplitude, maybe you multiply things ... he would have twelve different ways of creating something. And then thresholding it twenty different ways. And then go over the same data set. And in the end, out of these thousands of combinations there would be a peak that would appear and he would say, “Aha—we’ve found something.” And [someone] knowing statistics from nuclear physics would say, “Joe—this is not a Gaussian process—this is not normal—when you say there’s a three-standard-deviation effect, that’s not right, because you’ve gone through the data so many times.” And Joe would say, “But—What do you mean? When I was working, trying to find a radar signal in the Second World War, anything was legal, we could try any trick so long as we could grab a signal” (Collins 2004, pp. 394–395). This is not an eyewitness account but a widely held view, here expressed by one of Weber’s critics.
- 19.
Franklin shares this view.
- 20.
Collins pointed out that only one of the six attempted replications of Weber’s experiment was not criticized by other practitioners.
- 21.
- 22.
In discussions with some of Weber’s critics Franklin heard much more critical and far less polite comments about Weber and his work than appeared in the publications. For more discussion of differences between less formal comments and published work see Franklin (2013, pp. 234–236).
- 23.
- 24.
There is, of course, the possibility that a scholar might combine both approaches. The published record and interviews do not, of course, exhaust the possible sources of information. One might consult correspondence and laboratory notebooks, or attempt to reproduce the original calculations.
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Franklin, A., Collins, H. (2016). Two Kinds of Case Study and a New Agreement. In: Sauer, T., Scholl, R. (eds) The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30229-4_6
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