Sociologist of science Harry Collins continues his study of the progression of the gravitational-wave community, which recently produced three Nobel laureates, with Gravity's Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves, the latest work in the saga which started with Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves (2004). Notably, Gravity's Kiss was written while Collins joined the community as a participant observer equipped with interactive expertise of gravitational wave physics, allowing him to capture science as it unfolds. Specifically, the work opens amidst the (now historically significant) initial alert of a potential gravitational-wave signal detected by both the Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington large-scale land-based interferometers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on 14 September 2015. This very detection became the first detection of a gravitational wave by LIGO, infamously known as GW14092015 and labelled The Event by Collins. In addition to real-time analysis, Collins also argues that physicists’ belief that gravitational waves were detected by LIGO, despite the practice of blind injunctions (i.e. using false signals to ensure that physicists are prepared for an actual event) and the extensive signal processing required to identify the minute changes (on the order of 1/1,000th the width of a proton) in the length of the interferometer arms representing the detection of a gravitational wave, was a product of its social context and social change.

Gravity's Kiss is of particular importance as it provides an accounting of the period between the actual detection of The Event, verification of The Event as a gravitational-wave detection, drafting of the reporting paper for publication in the Physics Review Letters, the momentous announcement of The Event at press conferences throughout the world almost six months later on 11 February 2016, and the intervening detections which also occurred during this period. No other work as of now outside the academic publications by LIGO provides such an extensive accounting and analysis of these events, including and between The Event and the press conferences on 11 February 2016. Through Gravity's Kiss, the reader is also able to explore how a sociologist switches between the native and distanced sociological perspectives and the tensions associated with this dichotomy. For example, Collins recounts his nearly half-century of research of the gravitational-wave community while expressing both his desire that the events were not actual gravitational-wave detections, because failure to detect would produce situations that are of greater interest to a sociologist, and his shared excitement of The Event with the physicists.

How the LIGO physicists engaged in what Collins terms ‘deceit’ to maintain secrecy during the period of focus of Gravity's Kiss is a central theme in the work. Collins clarifies this focus near the end of the work by relating it to his recently published work Why Democracies Need Science (2017), which argues that Western societies have a dwindling number of trust institutions where ‘science is one of the few institutions [such as the gravitational-wave community] left that still has integrity built into it’ (p. 294). Particularly, Collins states, ‘We need to preserve gravitational physics and other sciences like it, to be a beacon for democracy so that our grandchildren may still know what a democracy is like’ (p. 294). Collins's position is that scientists should neither maintain the secrecy of the existence of potentially good results in order to avoid being ‘scooped’ nor delay announcing a particular discovery as ‘secrecy may jeopardize the science’ and the integrity of the community (pp. 61, 205).

Specifically, Collins expressed concern in how, as he describes, LIGO engaged in deceit when deciding to hold the details of The Event, Second Monday (a candidate detection occurring on 12 October 2015) and the Boxing Day Event (a detection occurring on 26 December 2015) from the partner astronomy community, amongst other others, while LIGO verified its results and drafted a paper for publication. To avoid getting scooped, LIGO physicists were only willing to provide the astronomy community with information of the possibility of an event of interest and where to point their telescopes to discern an electromagnetic signature of The Event without knowing what should be observed (pp. 35, 62). Collins also argues that deceit was present when the physicists decided not to report on the Second Monday and Boxing Day Events during the time between The Event and the initial press conference, despite these events being potential replications of The Event and having a signal strength within the expected range of events, because, first, at least Second Monday failed to rise to the level of significance (i.e. 5-sigma or a chance of less than one in 3,500,000 observations that the event would occur) set by the physics community for acceptance; second, the larger physics community would assess the event under evidential collectivism – when ‘speculative results are published for the wider collectivity of scientists to accept or reject’; and third, the team had not completed analysis and verification of the signal of the Boxing Day Event (pp. 96–97, 117–121).

In responding to Collins's urge that LIGO should avoid secrecy, Collins's work lacks analysis of the LIGO–VIRGO Collaboration's confidentiality provisions, its policy on releasing gravitational-wave triggers to the public, and how such agreements impact the behaviour of scientists and their scientific publication rituals. It is indeed entirely possible that LIGO's secrecy during this period was an effort to assist signatories in compliance with these agreements, which were in place well before The Event. Further, after speaking with a researcher at LIGO, the impetus for secrecy was described as a result of the past history of false detections within the gravitational-wave field and the ‘arrogance’ of the claim related to the notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence borrowed from Carl Sagan and Pierre-Simon LaPlace via Théodore Flournoy.

Gravity's Kiss also provides insights into the process of drafting the paper published on 12 February 2016 in the Physical Review Letters announcing the historic results of The Event. This account, along with Collins's previous works on the topic of gravitational-wave physics, pairs nicely with Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1986), which describes how experimental efforts become publishable papers and how, when reading a scientific journal publication, one needs an expert to identify what underlying experimental efforts occurred. Unlike Laboratory Life, Collins explores the desire of the gravitational-wave community to communicate their findings with those outside their immediate speciality. Further, Collins describes that the LIGO initial detection paper abandoned the normal literary technology through use of active voice and an unusual historical tone, including terminology resulting from negotiation and in some instances voting with final approval by the paper-writing committee, including/excluding content attributed to relentless professionalism (i.e. avoiding the incorporation of weak statements in a publication that would reduce the strength of the results), and was the product of over a thousand participants, and he acknowledges that LIGO's initial results create a new field of astronomy.