Q&A: Harry Collins on acquiring and using scientific knowledge

In search of inspiration for his master’s thesis in sociology at the University of Essex in 1970, Harry Collins wandered around the school’s scientific laboratories. He ended up writing about a research group that was trying to replicate a new type of laser. Collins focused on the tacit transfer of knowledge among scientists. “Science is more about learning a language or culture than about transmitting discrete bits of information or following formulae,” he says.

For his PhD, at the University of Bath, and then at various institutions around the world, Collins continued studying scientists. He has published more than 20 books on topics ranging from the discovery of gravitational waves to developments in artificial intelligence. Collins has been at Cardiff University in Wales since 1997, where he is founding director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science.

Collins became known for his examinations of how scientists could determine whether their results are correct, especially in new and disputed areas of research. But he has recently shifted his emphasis from how scientists practice science to the role science plays—or should play—in society. In the last decade, “we have moved into an era of political regimes which are not benign,” he says. “We don’t have the luxury to argue about social studies of science. My logic hasn’t changed, but my focus has changed: You have to find arguments that justify science, even when science can’t produce certainty.”

PT: Why did you look at scientists to begin with?

COLLINS: In grammar school I studied maths, physics, and chemistry. At the end of my master’s degree in sociology, I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, and I thought it would be interesting to go back into science labs. After some false starts I was introduced to some scientists who were trying to build a new kind of laser, called a transversely excited atmospheric pressure carbon dioxide laser, or TEA laser. I thought it would make an interesting master’s topic to see how people learned to build one of these lasers. What I had in mind is that I would study information transmission.

This perspective came through philosophers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. How do people come to accept what is true? In ordinary life it is a matter of social agreement, and so when I wandered into science labs, that question guided me.

PT: What did you learn?

COLLINS: I was lucky because it happened that nobody could make the laser work if they hadn’t spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn’t lase.

What people didn’t understand was that the inductance of the leads was important. If you’d been to somebody else’s lab, you would build a complicated metal framework to hold a big capacitor close to the top electrode. But if you were working from just a circuit diagram, you naturally put this big heavy thing on the bench, and the lead from the capacitor to the top electrode would be too long and have too high an inductance for the laser to work. That is the kind of thing that is involved in the transfer of tacit knowledge.

PT: What did you take forward in your work? And how?

COLLINS: For my PhD, I decided to carry on with the TEA laser study. I wanted to trace the knowledge diffusion network all the way from Quebec, where the laser was originally built, through American laboratories into British laboratories. I also decided that I should compare this study with more competitive fields: parapsychology and gravitational-wave physics.

In 1972 I drove 7000 miles around Canada and America visiting laboratories involved in those fields. The most memorable moment of the trip was at the end when I was driving across Nevada and putting together in my head the paper I was going to write about gravitational waves. As I drove along, I suddenly realized that my dissertation and my project had gone terribly wrong.

It was easy to tell when a TEA laser was working because it produced a very powerful beam of infrared radiation, sufficiently strong to make the wall of the laboratory smoke if it was pointing at it. But in the case of the gravity-wave detectors, I couldn’t tell whether the scientists had a working detector; that was the very thing they were arguing about. I realized I just couldn’t do this project. I had wasted all that taxpayer money.

PT: What did you do?

COLLINS: About 20 minutes later, it occurred to me that actually I had found something much more interesting: In disputed areas, how do scientists themselves decide whether their apparatus is working?

In those early days, you didn’t know what getting it right was—should a gravitational-wave detector be detecting gravitational waves, or should it be not detecting them? That is what scientists were arguing about. [In the 1960s, University of Maryland physicist Joseph Weber developed the first instruments intended to detect gravitational waves and claimed a detection that was never confirmed.] In an area of serious dispute, you can’t tell who is right simply by repeating the experiments because scientists disagree about when replication has been done properly. So, in cases like this, scientists invent theoretical reasons for why it must be this way or it must be that way. They will argue, and eventually settle by broad agreement, that such an apparatus should or shouldn’t see gravity waves. It’s more like a social agreement than a transfer of information or a formula.

For example, to debunk Weber’s detection claims, scientists had to get others to agree that Weber made mistakes in his statistical analysis and his handling of the data. And to debunk cold fusion, it had to be agreed that [Stanley] Pons and [Martin] Fleischmann were not the right kind of scientists to be doing the work. In neither case was it enough, at the time, simply to say the results weren’t replicated, even though that is how we describe it in retrospect. In 2015, with the first accepted discovery of gravitational waves, that kind of accusation could not be made to stick, even though some people tried it.

PT: During the “science wars” of the 1990s, your work was attacked . How would you explain the controversy?

COLLINS: Some scientists and philosophers attacked my work as undermining science because it makes science ordinary looking, like a craft practice. A good metaphor is a ship in a bottle. Most descriptions of scientific work are retrospective—the ship is in the bottle with the masts raised and the glue dried. People like me watched the moment-by-moment process of putting the ship together. That upsets some people because it demystifies the ship. Once you’ve seen the trick, you need to justify science in different and far more interesting ways. You can’t just say “it’s rational,” because scientists on all sides of a dispute are rational.

But I have never been interested in attacking science. I have always been a great enthusiast. I love science. That’s why I’ve spent my life studying it.

PT: Why did you shift from studying science to looking at science’s role in society?

COLLINS: The turning point for me was in the early 2000s with the revolt against the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. There was no evidence at all that the MMR vaccine leads to autism. My focus shifted to showing why we have to value science even though science does not have the kind of certainty that people like to present it as having.

The uncertainties are obvious whenever we get to science of public concern, such as when to enforce and lift pandemic lockdowns. Nobody can say when to lock down or how many lives will be saved. It’s not an exact science. Nevertheless, my view remains that the people you need to take the most notice of, even in circumstances like these, are scientists.

PT: How is science different from other fields?

COLLINS: Obviously there are scientists who are power mad, who are most interested in getting rich, and some who cheat, but they don’t represent the core of science. Assuming you have a body of decent scientists, they are the only people you can be sure are working from an aspiration of wanting to get to the truth of the matter—because wanting to get to the truth of the matter is what science is. You can’t guarantee that they are going to be right, but they are people you should be trusting, and they are the people you should be trying to fit into policymaking.

Take my sojourn with gravitational-wave physicists. The project went on experimentally for nearly 50 years. It’s almost crazy to think you could use an instrument on Earth to detect gravitational waves. Nevertheless, there was a body of scientists who were prepared to work on it, despite the probable expectation that they’d be dead before a gravitational wave was discovered. Whether you actually discover something is another question, but the aspiration is what makes science different from most other bits of social life. Religion is probably the nearest thing—where people at least believe they are seeking some eternal truth, even if what they are looking for is a fool’s errand.

PT: How should science contribute to social and political decision making?

COLLINS: The relationship between science and politics is what I’ve been working on recently. One feature of democracy—as opposed to populism—is that there are checks and balances, so that no part of the governing authority can just do what it likes. The standard checks and balances are the rule of law, free press, alternative chambers, and so forth. Well, science is another check and balance.

Science as a check and balance prevents potential dictators from saying what they like about the natural world. The importance of that role is clear with COVID-19 and with climate change.

PT: What is your sense of the public’s view of science?

COLLINS: I am severely worried about the distrust of science, as exemplified by the survey results about whether people will accept the COVID vaccine.

PT: Have you seen changes in the sociology of science—in particular as projects become larger and more international?

COLLINS: One of my arguments is that science is essentially a face-to-face activity. Trust and truth are developed in fairly small, bounded groups, but these groups stretch across international boundaries. I don’t think much has changed in that respect.

PT: What are you interested in these days?

COLLINS: I’m looking at the impact of the pandemic on scientific conferences. There is a febrile movement to shut down all scientific conferences because some people feel that the pandemic has shown we can manage without—that we can do science with Zoom, and so on.

The people who believe remote conferences can be a replacement are very vocal about the science conference circuit’s carbon footprint, and about the fact that the conference circuit is elitist. They want to get rid of both of those aspects.

It’s true that people’s initial experiences with remote conferences haven’t been too bad. That doesn’t surprise me, because it works reasonably well as long as you already know the people you are talking to. My view is that it would be a big mistake to think that this change can continue indefinitely. The reason goes back to what I said earlier: Science is done by developing trust in small, face-to-face groups. If it’s all Zoom, you are going to turn science into something that looks more like collecting “likes” over social media.

I’ve been doing surveys on this. We have some results, but the numbers are small. We asked people about their experiences of remote and face-to-face communication early in the lockdowns and again six months later. As time goes on, people seem to be changing their minds about the efficacy of remote interactions and discovering that face-to-face interactions cannot be entirely replaced.