Science is often presented as a machine for converting observation into certainty: conduct the experiment correctly, inspect the evidence, and the truth should emerge with its papers in order.

Collins and Pinch offer a “golem” instead. It is powerful, ingenious and indispensable, but also clumsy, socially formed and incapable of directing itself without human judgement. Through cases including gravitational-wave detection, relativity, cold fusion, solar neutrinos, experiments claiming the chemical transfer of memory, and the unexpectedly contentious sex lives of lizards, the authors examine how scientific knowledge is actually made.

Researchers must decide which apparatus is reliable, which failures matter, what counts as replication and when an accumulation of uncertain findings becomes accepted fact. Scientific consensus, in this account, is neither fraud nor divine revelation: it is knowledge produced through experiment, argument, interpretation and collective agreement. 

This is an unusually lucid introduction to the sociology of scientific knowledge because it avoids the lazy binary between reverence and debunking. An excellent book for readers interested in expertise, evidence, institutional authority and why uncertainty is not the opposite of knowledge but often the medium through which knowledge has to move.

Cambridge University Press Canto edition, 1994; later 1990s reprint. Paperback with light shelfwear and minor edge rubbing; clean and firm.