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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.
469:. The heavy investment of government and industrial interests into academic science has also blurred the line between public and private research, where entire academic departments, even at public universities, are often financed by private companies. Not all Big Science is related to the military concerns which were at its origins.
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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
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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
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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
508:
In addition, widespread sharing of scientific knowledge is necessary for rapid progress for both basic and applied sciences. However the sharing of data can be impeded for a number of reasons. For example, scientific findings can be classified by military interests or patented by corporate ones.
545:" 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
317:, said that World War II "is a physicist's war rather than a chemist's," a phrase that was cemented in the vernacular in post-war discussion of the role that those scientists played in the development of new weapons and tools, notably the
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in 1961, quoted in Stefan Theil, "Trouble in Mind: Two years in, a $ 1-billion-plus effort to simulate the human brain is in disarray. Was it poor management, or is something fundamentally wrong with Big
Science?",
509:
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.
344:
The need of a strong scientific research establishment was obvious in the shadow of the first atomic weapons to any country seeking to play a prominent role in world affairs. After the success of the
283:, are still relevant today as theoretical results by individual authors may have a significant impact, but very often the empirical verification requires experiments using constructions, such as the
389:: Similarly, the number of practitioners of science on any one project grew as well, creating difficulty, and often controversy, in the assignment of credit for scientific discoveries (the
329:. The bulk of these last two activities took place in a new form of research facility: the government-sponsored laboratory, employing thousands of technicians and scientists, managed by
279:, as scientific progress increasingly came to rely on large-scale projects usually funded by national governments or groups of governments. Individual or small group efforts, or
585:. 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
575:
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,
348:, governments became the chief patron of science, and the character of the scientific establishment underwent several key changes. This was especially marked in the
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449:: Because of the increase in cost to do basic science (with the increase of large machines), centralization of scientific research in large laboratories (such as
935:(New York, Cambridge University Press: 2000). For references to Kamerlingh Onnes as Big Science, see "Physics at Low Temperatures" in Helge Kragh,
568:'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
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system, for example, allows awarding only three individuals in any one topic per year, based on a 19th-century model of the scientific enterprise).
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in particular ushered in an era of massive machines (requiring massive staffs and budgets) as the tools of basic scientific research. The use of
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Evans, Lyn; Bordry, Frédérick; Liyanage, Shantha (30 April 2024), Liyanage, Shantha; Nordberg, Markus; Streit-Bianchi, Marilena (eds.),
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Weinberg's article addressed criticisms of the way in which the era of Big
Science could negatively affect science — such as astronomer
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whether scientists can be completely objective when their research contradicts the interests and intentions of their benefactors.
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Furner, Jonathan (1 June 2003). "Little Book, Big Book: Before and After Little
Science, Big Science: A Review Article, Part I".
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Forman, Paul. "Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960,"
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only partially overlaps. Galison introduced the notion of "trading zones," borrowed from the sociolinguistic study of
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particle accelerators with circumferences of many kilometers are the exemplars of Big
Science. Shown above is the
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Towards the end of the 20th century, not only projects in basic physics and astronomy, but also in
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The era of Big
Science has provoked criticism that it undermines the basic principles of the
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Weinberg, Alvin M. (21 July 1961). "Impact of Large-Scale
Science on the United States".
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Other historians have postulated many "precursors" to Big
Science in earlier times: the
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The popularization of the term "Big Science" is usually attributed to an article by
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Term used to describe a series of changes in science occurred in industrial nations
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For references to Tycho's work as Big Science, see John Robert Christianson,
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The Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America
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as well as new perspectives on large-scale science in other fields.
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Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
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system and preventing its incursion into the university system.
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The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
663:(1 ed.), Oxford University PressOxford, pp. 56–87,
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On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 1570-1601
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Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
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in 1904 have been cited as early examples of Big Science.
481:. Increased government funding has often meant increased
939:(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 74-86.
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gave a series of lectures that were published in 1963 as
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machines, such as the many sequencers used during the
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Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics
952:Galison, Peter; Hevly, Bruce William, eds. (1994).
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Big Science, Innovation, and Societal Contributions
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99:. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
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796:"Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's"
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193:There might be a discussion about this on the
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62:Learn how and when to remove these messages
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465:became big sciences, such as the massive
224:Learn how and when to remove this message
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771:, vol. 313, no. 4 (October 2015), p. 38.
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517:Further information:
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467:Human Genome Project
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199:improve this article
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201:if you can.
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566:Fred Hoyle
387:Big staffs
325:, and the
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119:newspapers
48:improve it
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606:Uraniborg
473:Criticism
427:Enormous
405:cyclotron
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