An Imitation Game concerning gravitational wave physics

📝 Abstract

The ‘Imitation Game’ is a Turing Test played with a human participant instead of a computer. Here the author, a sociologist, who has been immersed in the field of gravitational wave physics since 1972, tried to pass an Imitation Game as a gravitational wave physicist. He already passed such a test in mid-2000s but this test was more elaborate and compared his performance with that of other kinds of physicists and with other sociologists as well as gravitational wave physicists. The test was based on 8 technical questions about gravitational wave physics asked by Professor Sathyprakash of Cardiff University. Collins marks compared well with that of the other gravitational wave physicists and were markedly better than that of other classes of respondent. Collins also marked the test and it can be seen that the way he marked was also much closer to the gravitational wave physicists than other categories. Though Collins’s expertise can be shown to have degraded a little in the last ten years it seems not to have degraded a lot. This is important for his most recent book on the detection of gravitational waves from a black hole binary, this being Chapter 14 of this book, which is due to by published my MIT Press in February 2017.

💡 Analysis

The ‘Imitation Game’ is a Turing Test played with a human participant instead of a computer. Here the author, a sociologist, who has been immersed in the field of gravitational wave physics since 1972, tried to pass an Imitation Game as a gravitational wave physicist. He already passed such a test in mid-2000s but this test was more elaborate and compared his performance with that of other kinds of physicists and with other sociologists as well as gravitational wave physicists. The test was based on 8 technical questions about gravitational wave physics asked by Professor Sathyprakash of Cardiff University. Collins marks compared well with that of the other gravitational wave physicists and were markedly better than that of other classes of respondent. Collins also marked the test and it can be seen that the way he marked was also much closer to the gravitational wave physicists than other categories. Though Collins’s expertise can be shown to have degraded a little in the last ten years it seems not to have degraded a lot. This is important for his most recent book on the detection of gravitational waves from a black hole binary, this being Chapter 14 of this book, which is due to by published my MIT Press in February 2017.

📄 Content

An ‘Imitation Game’ concerning gravitational wave physics Harry Collins

This being Chapter 14 of Collins, Harry (2017, forthcoming) Gravity’s Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press

Chapter 14: The book, the author, the community and expertise. My contact with the field began in 1972 at the peak of the controversy over whether Joe Weber had detected gravitational waves with his room temperature resonant-bar detectors. The controversy over gravitational waves made up about a quarter of my PhD project in the sociology of science. In those days I conducted my research by going from laboratory to laboratory and interviewing the scientists. I conducted eight interviews in Britain and America in 1972 and a further 14 in Europe and America in 1975/6. The work I did in 1972 gave rise to what became a very well-known paper which secured my career. In 1985 I wrote Changing Order, basing it on three of the four sets of interviews I carried out in those years with the gravitational wave research being the central case-study. A much deeper engagement with the field began in in the mid-1990s. Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s I spent more time with gravitational wave physicists than with any other group including my fellow sociologists. In those years I travelled to pretty well every conference and workshop the physicists held, often completing more than half-a-dozen flights a year, many of them long-haul. During this period I got to know the community really well and made new friends and acquaintances among them.
Crucially, I got to like them and like their project. I felt comfortable among these scientists and privileged to be close to this extraordinary enterprise.
Relevant to this book is the analysis of expertise that has been central to my work for more than ten years. The crucial and most successful concept within that stream of work is ‘interactional expertise’.1 Interactional expertise is best exemplified by my understanding of gravitational- wave physics during the period of my intense involvement; in that time, over coffee, lunch and dinner I would talk gravitational-wave physics with my new friends and acquaintances and do a pretty good job of it even though I was not a physicist myself: I could not do a calculation; I could not contribute to papers; I could not help with building the apparatus. Nevertheless, I thought that someone like myself, with interactional expertise, but, as the language went, without ‘contributory expertise’, could understand the field to the point of being able to make reasonable technical judgments. I pointed out that peer-reviewers and managers of technological projects are in a not dissimilar position. This led me to try it out and I took part in an ‘imitation game’ in which a GW physicist asked technical questions – he asked seven in all – of me and another GW physicist. The dialogue – seven questions and seven pairs of answers with identities disguised – was then sent to nine other GW physicists who were asked to identify the participants, knowing one of them was me. Seven said they couldn’t work out who was who and two said I was the real physicist. So I passed!2 Interactional expertise degrades if it is not continually refreshed by constant contact with the changing field of science or technology, or other domain, to which it pertains. Because the

1 See Note XV in Notes and References (below). 2 See Note XVI in Notes and References (below). intensity of my engagement with GW physics has diminished since the mid-2000s, my expertise has also begun to fade. It was given a couple of boosts as I wrote Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog but I don’t think I ever quite regained the wide level of knowledge I had earlier.
Since the end of the Big Dog analysis another 3 or 4 years has passed during which time I have not been to more than about one meeting a year. I’ve fallen back further in my understanding of the field, particularly the detailed workings of the instruments. Fortunately the loss of that kind of knowledge has not been fatal; if I was trying to write a second edition of Gravity’s Shadow it would have been more troublesome.
Luckily this book is not about building detectors but about the way a detection is confirmed once the signals emerge from the completed devices. That means I need a narrow body of understanding which, fortunately, I refined to a pretty high level in writing Big Dog.
But to leave it like that would be disingenuous. Therefore I undertook another Imitation Game to see if it would reveal the fading of my expertise. Sathyprakash, Professor of Physics at Cardiff, once more helped by inventing a new set of questions more suited to 2015. He set eight questions as follows.
Q1. Advanced LIGO and Virgo data contain two signals from identical binary neutron star systems with their

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