About a month ago an article in Slate hyped a paper by the sociologist Harry Collins. The paper described an experiment where Collins “passed himself off” as an expert physicist – and the people that he convinced were other experts, all in the field. The field is gravitational waves, which is pretty much my field, and he didn’t just manage to convince the experts – in a direct competition with another gravitational wave physicist he convinced the vast majority that he was the expert and the true physicist was the sociologist!
Slate seemed to think that it was almost a rerun of the Sokal “experiment” during the Science Wars, although many later commentators disagreed. Perhaps the most useful comment was from Collins himself, in this thread from OpenScience. In particular Collins makes the point that he is more interested in whether mathematics is a crucial tool for all physicists (rather than for physics as a whole), and has now released a paper claiming that it is not. This, he says, has particular impact on how physics should be taught – a claim far more interesting in itself.
Posted by reivers 
