Bigscience

The term Big Science came into vogue in the 1960s thanks to two important books by physicists, Reflections on Big Science, by Alvin Weinberg, and Little Science, Big Science … and Beyond, by Dereck de Solla Price. Both authors focused on the rapidly increasing size and expense of scientific projects, identified this increase in scale as a distinctive feature of science in the post–World War II era, and worried about the consequences of the “disease” of Big Science. In his oft quoted book, Weinberg identified the “triple diseases” of Big Science: “journalitis, moneyitis and administrati-tis.” Journalitis stemmed from the need for public support for large, expensive projects, which led to the requirement that scientific results be published in the popular press as well as in ...