Big Science

Inevitability of Large-Scale Research

The notion of Big Science is derived from the context of physics. Historians trace the phenomena back to the initiation of large-scale technological projects, such as the development of hydroelectric power system in the 1920s, and the development of radar systems and nuclear weapons during World War II. The term appeared in a 1961 article in Science written by Alvin Weinberg, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, discussing the political significance of large-scale research for our time. Large-scale research projects caught the public and scientific attention in the inevitable debate on prioritization that followed the exponential growth in the number of researchers and scientific projects of the time.

Such projects marked a crucial change in science as they came to be marked by “journal-itis, money-itis and administrat-itis.” Big Science was promoted in mass media communication, raised issues of financing and involved the need for bureaucratic organization. Research priorities had for these reasons also become a matter of national prestige, expressing the aspirations of the culture. Weinberg saw Big Science as an inevitable stage in the development of science.

Whether the public liked it or not, they would have to learn to live with Big Science. Studies of Big Science have since played an important role in discussions of the legitimate place and role of science in society. Two different viewpoints have dominated a discussion on how to understand the inevitable character of Big Science: Is the imperative scientific or social?

Paradigmatic instances of Big Science represent a paradox of natural science. The smaller the object of study, the larger the experimental systems tend to become. This has recently been demonstrated in the launching of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, aimed at studying the basic questions of particle physics. It took 20 years to plan and build the laboratory site, involving 8,000 researchers and engineers from more than 85 countries. Weinberg's article appeared during a period where scientific and public attention where drawn to large accelerator centers of high energy physics. During the following decades, the question of what lessons one could draw from the growth of large-scale research were often answered through studies of such centers. For this reason, Big Science became associated with discussions of the demands of basic research, focusing on the epistemic challenges of pursuing the frontiers of science one step further. Large accelerator centers implied hugely complicated technological apparatuses [Page 50]and management of a large organization of researchers from different fields of expertise.

...