  Collins strongest candidate for an example of the experimenters’ regress is presented in his history of the early attempts to detect gravitational radiation, or gravity waves. (For more detailed discussion of this episode see (Collins 1985; 1994; Franklin 1994; 1997a) In this case, the physics community was forced to compare Weber’s claims that he had observed gravity waves with the reports from six other experiments that failed to detect them. On the one hand, Collins argues that the decision between these conflicting experimental results could not be made on epistemological or methodological grounds—he claims that the six negative experiments could not legitimately be regarded as  replications[7]  and hence become less impressive. On the other hand, Weber’s apparatus, precisely because the experiments used a new type of apparatus to try to detect a hitherto unobserved  phenomenon,[8]  could not be subjected to standard calibration techniques.