Big Science

The practice of creating knowledge about the world by employing the ScientificMethod (as in all types of science [see WhatIsScience ]) whilst also consuming a large amount of the available LimitedResources.
The set of corporations, universities and other (usually big) entities who participate in the above.

This is the type of science typical of modernity. Some see it as a result of the increasing level of education of the general population. Some see it as a result of necessity. Some believe that ComputerScience (and its technological contributions to society) may reduce the need for science to be conducted in this way. For an example, see "ANewKindOfScience" by StephenWolfram (ISBN 1579550088 ).

It's (arguably) a GoodThing.

Examples:

1942 The Manhattan project -- perhaps the first ever BigScience project?
1969 The Apollo project
The sequencing of the human genome (and others)
The construction of increasingly large and powerful accelerators for particle physics
- surely that is BigEngineering?, the science comes from running experiments and analysing the results
- I agree; every BigScience project probably has a major element of BigEngineering? in it. You can't do the science without doing the engineering first, and you can't do the engineering without understanding the science.
Hubble space telescope

Does "big" necessarily involve large, heavy pieces of machinery? Or does merely large numbers of people qualify -- such as

1939 GC&CS moves to BletchleyPark, decoding ULTRA (more than 10,000 people)

Sounds like big science to me... Of course, they also developed some pretty groundbreaking computer machinery there, so it works on either count.

OK, this is "merely" BigEngineering?, but I've been told that the largest single project ever (in terms of material moved, people involved, mortality, etc.) was

1913 Panama Canal completed -- France paid $300,000,000 then U.S. paid $375,000,000. __ workers. 232,000,000 cubic yards of dirt removed. 4,500,000 cubic yards of concrete poured. At the hight of construction, 40,000 workers. All workers paid in gold and silver coins, never in paper money. __ . Over 5,000 lives lost during construction, not including over 20,000 lives lost to yellow fever before Walter Reed discovered the cause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal

Contrast ApolloProject? with SpaceShipOne.

Granted that the later project has benefited from the earlier, but the newer effort has accomplished more in less time on less money (by an order of magnitude) than the older.

Can conclusions about SmallerScience? be derived from this?

What science did either Apollo or SS1 do? They are mainly feats of engineering, I think. Or was that the point, big science is about making a big impact in society not solving big questions (although Hubble, Manhattan, Cern etc. arguably did both)

An order of magnitude more for early stuff doesn't seam at odds with pioneering projects in other areas. BeagleTwo? is a good example of what happens when you don't spend the money and time.

Comparing SpaceShipOne with Apollo is pretty far-fetched. SS1 is merely suborbital. It doesn't even compare with MercuryProject?.

October 2006: Currently the NationalCancerInstitute? has a big emphasis on BigScience. For example, redoing the HumanGenomeProject? except on several flavors of cancer cells rather than normal cells. The downside to this is that the cash going to BigScience is drawn away from cash that used to go to SmallScience?. SmallScience? in this context means the NationalInstitutesOfHealth? R01 granting mechanism that primarily funds individual independent laboratories at various academic insitutions. This is a big gamble because the BigScience in question here doesn't involve big intellectual contribution from many scientists, but rather mostly requires BigCash? to pay for robotic and automated systems. The net effect is a reduction in the HumanCapital? associated with cancer research. The jury is still out on whether it's worth trading the humans in for robots in this instance. Again, it could be argued that this is BigEngineering? rather than BigScience.

An album by LaurieAnderson?

Contributors: WaylonFlinn, AnonymousDonors