Starting Points
This book uses a variety of perspectives, conceptual tools and empirical cases to argue that Big Science in North America and (Western) Europe has transformed dramatically and, by most accounts, beyond recognition.1 Promoting a new understanding and a partly new use of the slightly worn-out and arguably very vague and analytically unworkable term âBig Science,â the book argues that the basic structures of Big Science (big machines, big organizations, and big politics) have remained in place but that the content of the research activities that nowadays constitute Big Science are radically different from some decades ago. Likewiseâand importantlyâthe political and organizational forms for Big Science have changed profoundly. There is thus both continuity and change in Big Science, and while the central term is ambiguous, it can be relied upon as an independent variable in the conceptualization of the topic and the building of a framework for the analysis: although many of the preconditions for its original existence are long gone, Big Science has not vanished, but has transformed.
Thomas Kuhn (1959) identified an âessential tensionâ between innovation and conventionality in science, which is a workable starting point for much conceptualization of publicly funded and organized science as an institution, social system, profession, or organized social activity, as shown by Whitley (2000/1984) and Ziman (1987), among others. A scientific knowledge claim must be new in order to be meaningful, but conventional in order to make sense. If it does not in any part describe something previously unknown, it does not advance knowledge, and if it does not in crucial ways connect to existing knowledge and adhere to certain institutionalized procedures and norms with respect to form and presentation, it cannot be comprehensible, relevant, taken seriously, and integrated into the scientific commons. This fundamental guiding principle for science as a human activity also extends to its organization (in a broad sense, and understood as a verb): The vocational activities of individual scientists and the aggregation of these activities to organizations, institutions, and systems, as well as to assemblages of facts and claims, and to physical infrastructures, are crucially devoted to change and fundamentally anchored in continuity. This includes Big Science, and it is the basic theoretical realization that enables the conceptualization of a transformed Big Science, as well as the documentation and analysis of its transformation processes.
But continuity and change are also topical themes in the broader empirical and theoretical study of science in society, science policy, science governance, and science organization. A dominating discursive theme in such study, currently and at least two decades back, is an alleged change of science and its interface with society, and the flood of conceptualizations and empirical observations concerning this change is overwhelming. Whether it regards a changing Social Contract for Science (e.g. Elzinga 1997; Vavakova 1998; Hessels et al. 2009), the influence of corporate managerial practices on the governance of universities (e.g. Berman 2014; Deem et al. 2007; Ginsberg 2011), the changing nature of the valuation of scientific knowledge in society (e.g. Radder 2010; Carrier and Nordmann 2011; Mirowski and Sent 2002), or the alleged poststructuralist emancipation from delusional modernist beliefs in scientific truths by radical change in cultural discourse (e.g. Latour 1993; Bloor 1976; Collins 1981), there seems to be consensus that science has changed or is changing beyond recognitionâbut only partially beyond recognition. Some essential features remain and guarantee continuity, which also shows by the ubiquitous use of prefixes in the flood of conceptualizations of current science: postacademic science (Ziman 1994), postnormal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), strategic science (Irvine and Martin 1984), finalized science (Böhme et al. 1973), mode 2 science (Gibbons et al. 1994) (for an overview, see Hessels and van Lente 2008)âall of them signal the change of some (key) features while a core of some kind remains intact.
A very similar message is at the core of this book and its description of a profound transformation of a well-known (yet perhaps conceptually elusive) phenomenon of science and technology of the second half of the twentieth century. Thereby, it is acknowledged that there has been change to what Big Science is, compared to when it emerged and first grew to prominence, and this book makes a case for such an interpretation of a slice of recent history of science, with a crucial conceptual awareness that draws from an eclectic and pragmatic definition of the work as sociological study of science policy and organization. But, importantly, there is also continuity, and an ultimate aim of the book is to contrast continuity and change so as to conceptualize a transformed Big Science not as something entirely new and discontinuous but as something partly new and partly built out of existing elements and within existing institutional frameworks. The basic relevance is secured by showing that there is Big Science with some important new features (see next section), and a ubiquity of studies of (old) Big Science or studies where the concept Big Science is used with a far too broad or careless definition (see the section after that), from which it follows that more work is needed to conceptualize and empirically investigate what has and has not changed in Big Science, and how Big Science can be characterized and defined in various contexts, for various purposes. The book describes various aspects of how Big Science has transformed, into what, and why. It goes deeper in understanding this, empirically and theoretically, than previous work on the same topic has done. By combining the compilation of previously published articles and an extended review of secondary sources with some additional original empirical work and not least a new synthesis, the book aims to cover as many aspects of the phenomenon as possible, and present the reader with a coherent set of empirical observations, theoretical insights, and arguments that advance the sociological and historical study of Big Science. The definition of Big Science used in the book is tailored to its purposes, and the details are found later in this introductory chapter, which also draws up a framework for the whole book and provides the basic tools for the analysis.
The Kuhnian âessential tensionâ and its organizational incarnation in the dichotomy of continuity and change provides a useful starting point also for identifying and discussing the origins of Big Science as we know it. Regardless of how exactly it is defined, Big Science is part of a broader science system or part of the âinstitution of science,â as Merton (1938, 1942, 1957) quite persuasively called it. The use of very big instrumentation or the organization of science projects in large teams is, from one viewpoint, a new technical and/or organizational approach to scientific work that itself has a very long tradition. The evolution of scientific disciplines over the centuries is not within the aims of this introduction or this book to lay out, explain or analyze, but Big Science places itself in this evolution as a recent variety of scientific method or organization to advance human knowledge by the use of systematic and socially structured inquiry, with a long institutional tradition. In other words, Big Science is a recent branch of activities in the natural sciences that happen to demand the use a specific type of very large and complex instrumentation and/or very large and complex organizational arrangements to maintain its progress in the accumulation of knowledge. In shortâand this conceptualization will be returned to in greater detail belowâBig Science is understood as science made big in three dimensions: big machines, big organizations, and big politics. But the transformed Big Science also constitutes a change in the way (some) scientists use instrumentation, with a division of labor between operation and use of instrumentation on a new scale and with new organizational (and political) features. As such, it has spread through the disciplines of the natural sciences at a pace that suggests it is not a marginal phenomenon, but central in the current international science system, and in congruence with several other major shifts (see below).
What Has Changed?
Big Science in the original version was a Cold War phenomenon. It was born out of the highly specific (geo)political and scientific-technological conditions of the post-World War II era, when the superpower competition on global scale and the associated race to technological superiority (also outside the realm of nuclear weaponry) clearly dominated most policy areas and political life, including publicly/governmentally funded science of which Big Science is a part. Hence, the old Big Science had a clear military connection, as well as a politics that was oriented to the bipolar geopolitical world order. This military connection is discussed at some length in Chap. 2, where also the Cold War era and the post-Cold War era are differentiated, and the old and transformed versions of Big Science are connected to these historical periods. It deserves, though, to be mentioned already at this point that this post-Cold War era of science and science policy did not, in a strict sense, start in the years 1989â1991 when the Cold War officially ended (in political terms), although the radical tilt of the global geopolitical balance in those years certainly affected the form and function of Big Science. Rather, science and science policy transformed gradually during the whole post-World War II period, and the transformed version of Big Science emerged long before the end of the Cold War, as did the new politics that sustained it, and thus the post-Cold War era is a flexible concept that refers to a time period with a fuzzy starting point and no end point (yet). Nonetheless, it has conceptual relevance because it can be contrasted against the very specific political, scientific/technological, and societal order of the Cold War, and in this contrast, several important insights are revealed.
The old Big Science, as a Cold War phenomenon, was most of all the use of large machinesâreactors and accelerators âfor subatomic physics research with some connection to nuclear energy and weaponry (e.g. Hiltzik 2015; Stevens 2003). In addition, huge telescopes for ground-based astronomy (e.g. McCray 2006) and various space programs (e.g. Smith 1989) were launched under the same auspices (the military connection) and contributed to a similar perpetuation of images of scientific and technological superiority vis-Ă -vis the other superpower as well as the capabilities of smaller yet important countries. Very soon, however, the military connection was in practice lost, not least because the military (classified) and civilian (open) research and development (R&D) activities on nuclear energy and related technologies became institutionally separated (Hewlett and Holl 1989). Civilian Big Science became all about seeking answers to the most fundamental questions regarding the structure of matter on subatomic level and the origins of the universe, which was done by the help of increasingly larger accelerator complexes for particle physics , where elementary particles were smashed together, and the result of the smash, the particlesâ smaller constituents (e.g. quarks), observed and documented2 (Hoddeson et al. 1997). The transformed Big Science is likewise about the use of large machinesâpredominantly accelerators but to some extent also reactors âbut for other purposes and in a whole other setting, including serving a far broader spectrum of scientific disciplines and with a broader and more intense interface with society including innovation for economic growth and the work to meet societyâs grand challenges. Two techniques dominate: the use of neutrons and x-rays , both produced by particle accelerators (and in the case of neutrons, also reactors) for the study of materials (including biological materials) on atomic, molecular, and nanometer levels. The facilities are called neutron sources or neutron scattering labs, synchrotron radiation labs (or simply synchrotrons), and free electron laser labs or free electron lasers. Neutrons have been used as a probe to study materials since World War II , and their usefulness and feasibility for these purposes have gradually increased since then. In the 1960s, the first purpose-built reactors for neutron scattering3 were constructed, and in the 1980s, an accelerator-based technique for producing intense beams of neutrons (spallation sources ) emerged. Neutrons complement x-rays, which have been used for over a century in various studies of matter, produced by tabletop sources such as those used at hospitals and airports. When in the 1960s it was realized that the x-rays (and ultraviolet , visible, and infrared light) accidentally produced by accelerators built for particle physics research could be extracted and put to practical useâand that their intensity, and thus usefulness for all kinds of experimental applications, was several orders of magnitude better than what was otherwise availableâthe organized exploitation of synchrotron radiation began. It has since grown tremendously and spread across the disciplinary spectrum of the natural and technical sciences. Free electron laser is a rather recent refinement of synchrotron radiation that has brought extreme improvements on some parameters, and free electron laser labs exhibit some specific organizational features to distinguish them from neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation facilities.4 Especially the growth of life sciences applications of neutron scattering, synchrotron radiation and free electron laser has been remarkable in the past two to three decades, but several other fields of science have also benefited enormously from the technical, scientific, and organizational development of these labs (see Chap. 2 and Appendix 1). The users of neutron scattering, synchrotron radiation, and free electron lasers in Europe and the United States are today counted in tens of 1000s.5
In addition to the Cold War superpower competition logic and the arms race, the old Big Science relied heavily on the post-World War II science policy regime of elite governance and the promotion of science for its own sake, as a general source of good, combined with the Linear Model of Technological Innovation as the framework for motivating public expenses in broader perspective (Elzinga 2012; Greenberg 199...