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This article is about the term. For the album, see Big Science (album).

In 1977 the completion of the Shiva laser at LLNL ushered in a new field of big science; laser fusion.

Big Science is a term used by scientists and historians of science to describe a series of changes in science which occurred in industrial nations during and after World War II. Image File history File links Question_book-3. ... Big Science is the 1982 debut album by avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson. ... -1... -1... The Shiva laser was an extremely powerful 20 beam infrared neodymium glass (silica glass) laser built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1977 for the study of inertial confinement fusion and long-scale-length laser-plasma interactions. ... Aerial view of the lab and surrounding area. ... In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), nuclear fusion reactions are initiated by heating and compressing a target – a pellet that most often contains deuterium and tritium – by the use of intense laser or ion beams. ... For a List of scientists, see: List of anthropologists List of astronomers List of biologists List of chemists List of computer scientists List of economists List of engineers List of geologists List of inventors List of mathematicians List of meteorologists List of physicists Scientist pairs List of scientist pairs See... The history of science and technology (HST) is a field of history which examines how humanitys understanding of science and technology has changed over the millennia. ... A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor demonstrates the Meissner effect. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000...

Development

While World War I was the first war in which science played a major role in warfare and armaments, the increase in military funding of science following the second World War was on a scale wholly unprecedented. World War II has often been called "the physicists' war" for the role that those scientists played in the development of new weapons and tools, notably the proximity fuze, radar, and the atomic bomb. 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 universities (in this case, the University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). “The Great War ” redirects here. ... For other uses, see War (disambiguation). ... A weapon is a tool used to kill or incapacitate a person or animal, or destroy a military target. ... The military funding of science has had a powerful transformative effect on the practice and products of scientific research since the early 20th century. ... Many famous physicists of the 20th and 21st century are found on the list of recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics. ... A proximity fuze (also called a VT fuze, for variable time) is a fuze that is designed to detonate an explosive automatically when the distance to target becomes smaller than a predetermined value or when the target passes through a given plane. ... For other uses, see Radar (disambiguation). ... The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, rose some 18 km (11 mi) above the epicenter. ... For the community in Florida, see University, Florida. ... Berkeley Davis Irvine Los Angeles Merced Riverside San Diego Santa Barbara Santa Cruz UC Office of the President in Oakland The University of California (UC) is a public university system in the state of California. ... “MIT” redirects here. ...

In the shadow of the first atomic weapons, the importance of a strong scientific research establishment was apparent to any country wishing to play a major role in international politics. After the success of the Manhattan Project, a scientific and technological endeavor on an unprecedented scale, governments became the chief patron of science, and the character of the scientific establishment underwent several key changes. This was especially marked in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but also to a lesser extent in many other countries. This article is about the World War II nuclear project. ... For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation). ...

Definitions

"Big Science" usually implies, and gets its "big-ness" from, these specific characteristics:

• Big budgets: No longer required to rely on philanthropy or industry, scientists were able to use budgets on an unprecedented scale for basic research.
• Big staffs: 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 Nobel Prize system, for example, allows awarding only three individuals in any one topic per year, based on a 19th-century model of the scientific enterprise).
• Big machines: Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron at his Radiation Laboratory in particular ushered in an era of massive machines (requiring massive staffs and budgets) as the tools of basic scientific research. The use of many machines, such as the many sequencers used during the Human Genome Project, might also fall under this definition..

Enormous superconducting synchrotron particle accelerators with circumferences of many kilometers are the exemplars of Big Science. Shown above is the Fermilab Tevatron.

• Big laboratories: 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 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or CERN) has become a cost-effective strategy, though questions over facility access have become prevalent.

Towards the end of the 20th century, not only projects in basic physics and astronomy, but also in life sciences became big sciences, such as the massive project involved in the sequencing of the human genome. 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. Philanthropy is the act of donating money, goods, time, or effort to support a charitable cause, usually over an extended period of time and in regard to a defined objective. ... The Nobel Prize (Swedish: ) was established in Alfred Nobels will in 1895, and it was first awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace in 1901. ... Ernest O. Lawrence Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist and Nobel Laureate best known for his invention, utilization, and improvement of the cyclotron beginning in 1929, and his later work in uranium-isotope separation in the Manhattan Project. ... A pair of Dee electrodes with loops of coolant pipes on their surface at the Lawrence Hall of Science. ... The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), formerly the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and usually shortened to Berkeley Lab or LBL, is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. ... The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an international scientific research project. ... Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory File links The following pages link to this file: Fermilab Categories: United States government images ... Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory File links The following pages link to this file: Fermilab Categories: United States government images ... Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials at low temperatures, characterised by the complete absence of electrical resistance and the damping of the interior magnetic field (the Meissner effect. ... Synchrotrons are now mostly used for producing monochromatic high intensity X-ray beams; here, the synchrotron is the circular track, off which the beamlines branch. ... Aerial view of the Fermilab site. ... Tevatron is a circular particle accelerator (or synchrotron) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. ... The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), formerly the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and usually shortened to Berkeley Lab or LBL, is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. ... CERN logo The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: ), commonly known as CERN (see Naming), pronounced (or in French), is the worlds largest particle physics laboratory, situated just northwest of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the... Biology studies the variety of life (clockwise from top-left) E. coli, tree fern, gazelle, Goliath beetle Biology is the science of life (from the Greek words bios = life and logos = word). ... A graphical representation of the normal human karyotype. ...

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. 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. Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. ... A particle accelerator uses electric fields to propel charged particles to great energies. ... Elitism is the belief or attitude that the people who are considered to be the elite — a selected group of persons with outstanding personal abilities, wealth, specialised training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are the people whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously, or... The Age of Enlightenment refers to the 18th century in European philosophy, and is often thought of as part of a larger period which includes the Age of Reason. ...

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.^[1] Weinberg compared the large-scale enterprise of science in the 20th century to the wonders of earlier civilization (the pyramids, the palace of Versailles): ... A combination of federal, state and private funds is providing $300 million for the construction of 13 facilities on ORNLs new main campus. ... Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is considered one of the worlds most prestigious scientific journals. ... This is about the polyhedron. ... This article is about the city 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. Sir Frederick Hoyle, FRS, (born on June 24, 1915 in Gilstead, Yorkshire, England – August 20, 2001 in Bournemouth, England)[1] was a British astronomer, he was educated at Bingley Grammar School and notable for a number of his theories that run counter to current astronomical opinion, and a writer of... The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories are a system of research facilities and laboratories funded and controlled by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose advancing science and aiding in the economic and defensive national interests of the United States of America. ...

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. Many historians have postulated many "pre-cursors" 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.^[2] Uraniborg was the astronomical/astrological observatory of Tycho Brahe; built circa 1576-1580 on Hven (also known as Ven or Hveen), an island in the Öresund; between Zealand and Scania. ... This article is about the astronomer. ... Cryogenics is a branch of physics (or engineering) that studies the production of very low temperatures (below –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K) and the behavior of materials at those temperatures. ... Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (September 21, 1853 – February 21, 1926) was a Dutch physicist. ...

Notes

1. ^ Alvin M. Weinberg, "Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States" Science 134, no. 3473 (21 July 1961), p. 161-164.
2. ^ For references to Tycho's work as Big Science, see John Robert Christianson, On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 1570-1601 (New York, Cambridge University Press: 2000). For references to Kamerlingh Onnes as Big Science, see "Physics at Low Temperatures" in Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 74-86.