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LIFE scientists may be making more headlines these days, but with centuries of solid success under their belt, physicists remain the 400lb gorillas of the scientific world.

Lumbering through remote areas of academic endeavour, highly territorial and all too aware of their strength, physicists are usually given a pretty wide berth. Few of us have much idea of their behaviour and habitat, and still fewer the ability or inclination to find out.

One who has is the physicist-turned-sociologist-of-science Harry Collins of Cardiff University in Wales. For the past 30-odd years he has been studying a group of particularly aggressive physicists found in a very inhospitable area: gravitational wave research. Now Collins has written up his observations and insights in a landmark study that surely makes him the Dian Fossey of this scientific band.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time triggered by titanic events such as the collision of black holes or the birth of the universe. Predicted by Einstein in 1916, they have never been seen 鈥� or at least, most physicists don鈥檛 think they have. And therein lies the core of the tale Collins has to tell: how one researcher, Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland in College Park, convinced his peers that it was worth hunting for the waves, built a detector and in 1967 began claiming to have found them 鈥� only to see his claim taken apart and dismissed.

Through interviews, observations and reflection, Collins recounts the story and its aftermath in unprecedented and often fascinating detail. In the process, he highlights the vast gulf between the image of dispassionate objectivity that scientists like to present to the outside world and the heated, hard-nosed reality of cutting-edge research. From sharp exchanges over arcane technicalities to character assassination and the excommunication of 鈥渉eretics鈥�, this is science red in tooth and claw.

Collins also gives intriguing insights into the role of personality in science. Where some are happy to play with unexpected findings, others seem determined to defend the status quo, while a few set themselves up as defenders of Scientific Truth. Yet as Collins makes clear, truth isn鈥檛 always clear-cut, despite some scientists鈥� attempts to make it so. For example, contrary to the sanitised accounts in the scientific literature, Weber was not alone in detecting signs of gravitational waves; even some of his critics obtained positive results. The difference was they chose not to believe their own data.

The sheer scale of Collins鈥檚 study and its scrupulous separation of facts from rumour is especially impressive. It is not without its flaws: the detail is sometimes overwhelming, and his occasionally Byzantine metaphors obscure more than they elucidate. Most serious of all is the frequent garbling of key statistical concepts, a trait Collins seems to have acquired from the scientists themselves.

Even so, Gravity鈥檚 Shadow is an astonishing achievement, and gives the lie to the charge that sociologists of science have no idea how science really works. It is surely destined to become a definitive study of a science in the making.