Big Science - Historiography of Big Science

Historiography of Big Science

The popularization of the term "Big Science" is usually attributed to an article by Alvin M. Weinberg, then director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published in Science in 1961. This was a response to Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, in which the departing U.S. president warned against the dangers of what he called the "military-industrial complex" and the potential "domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money". Weinberg compared the large-scale enterprise of science in the 20th century to the wonders of earlier civilization (the pyramids, the palace of Versailles):

When history looks at the 20th century, she will see science and technology as its theme; she will find in the monuments of Big Science—the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors—symbols of our time just as surely as she finds in Notre Dame a symbol of the Middle Ages. ... We build our monuments in the name of scientific truth, they built theirs in the name of religious truth; we use our Big Science to add to our country's prestige, they used their churches for their cities' prestige; we build to placate what ex-President Eisenhower suggested could become a dominant scientific caste, they built to please the priests of Isis and Osiris.

Weinberg's article addressed criticisms of the way in which the era of Big Science could negatively affect science — such as astronomer Fred Hoyle's contention that excessive money for science would only make science fat and lazy — and encouraged, in the end, limiting Big Science only to the national laboratory system and preventing its incursion into the university system.

Since Weinberg's article there have been many historical and sociological studies on the effects of Big Science both in and out of the laboratory. Soon after that article, Derek J. de Solla Price gave a series of lectures that were published in 1963 as Little Science, Big Science. The book describes the historical and sociological transition from "small science" to "big science" and the qualitative differences between the two; it inspired the field of scientometrics as well as new perspectives on large-scale science in other fields.

The Harvard historian Peter Galison has written several books addressing the formation of big science. Major themes include the evolution of experimental design, from table-top experiments to today's large-scale collider projects; accompanying changes in standards of evidence; and discourse patterns across researchers whose expertise only partially overlaps. Galison introduced the notion of "trading zones," borrowed from the sociolinguistic study of pidgins, to characterize how such groups learn to interact.

Other historians have postulated many "precursors" to Big Science in earlier times: the Uraniborg of Tycho Brahe (in which massive astronomical instruments were made, often with little practical purpose) and the large cryogenics laboratory established by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1904 have been cited as early examples of Big Science.