Criticism
The era of Big Science has provoked criticism that it undermines the basic principles of the scientific method. Results of experiments which require massive and unique machines like particle accelerators are often difficult to verify. Access to scientific facilities is often limited to those who are already accomplished, leading to charges of elitism. And increased government funding has often meant increased military funding, which some claim subverts the Enlightenment-era ideal of science as a pure quest for knowledge. For example, historian Paul Forman has argued that during World War II and the Cold War, the massive scale of defense-related funding prompted a shift in physics from basic to applied research.
Many scientists also complain that the requirement for increased funding makes a large part of the scientific activity filling out grant requests and other budgetary bureaucratic activity, and the intense connections between academic, governmental, and industrial interests have raised the question of whether scientists can be completely objective when their research contradicts the interests and intentions of their benefactors.
In addition, widespread sharing of scientific knowledge is necessary for rapid progress for both basic and applied sciences. The powerful interests that control Big Science-type projects can impede progress by limiting this sharing. For example, scientific findings can be classified by military interests or patented by corporate ones. Grant competitions, while they stimulate interest in a topic, can also increase secretiveness among scientists because application evaluators may value uniqueness more than incremental, collaborative inquiry.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)