Big Science

Big Science refers to scientific projects that are conducted on a large scale and at great expense. These projects require teams of researchers, sophisticated equipment, and large amounts of funding, usually from a national government. The concept of Big Science was developed in the 1930s and was first utilized during World War II in the Manhattan Project—the development of the first atomic bomb. After the war, the Manhattan Project became the template for future Big Science research, as national governments increasingly began allocating funds toward scientific projects. Some of the most high-profile scientific accomplishments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were the result of Big Science, including the Apollo space program, the Human Genome Project, and Europe's Large Hadron Collider.

Background

Prior to World War II, most scientific research was conducted on a relatively small scale by individual scientists who worked either alone or with a few assistants. Many of these scientists were on staff at universities and did research and experiments in school-funded laboratories or in private facilities. Isaac Newton, for example, developed his theories of gravity and motion while at Cambridge University in England. Albert Einstein was working as a patent clerk in Switzerland when he came up with his special theory of relativity.

In a way, the origins of Big Science can be traced back to small-scale experiments conducted at a laboratory in Manchester, England. In 1911, physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom by noticing how electrically charged radioactive particles bounced back after being directed at a piece of gold foil. This meant that a dense nucleus—a core of protons and neutrons—was at the center of the atom and was surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons. Rutherford made this discovery with a staff of two assistants and a grant of 75 pounds—the equivalent of about $91—from the Royal Society of London.

Rutherford's experiment only determined that atomic nuclei existed; the scientific limitations of the era did not allow physicists to penetrate the orbiting electrons to examine the atom's center. In the 1930s, American scientist Ernest Lawrence invented a device called a cyclotron, which used magnetic and electrical fields to accelerate particles to the speeds required to break through to the atomic nucleus.

Lawrence's first cyclotron was small and cost less than $100. As Lawrence improved the technology, the size and cost of the cyclotrons continued to increase. To house these inventions, he acquired his own building from the University of California in Berkeley and established the Radiation Laboratory. By 1939, Lawrence's cyclotron had grown to 184 inches and required the construction of a new building on a hillside overlooking the campus. At its height, the new Radiation Laboratory employed more than sixty scientists and dozens of technicians.

That same year, the American government became aware that German scientists were working on a weapon that used the energy released by splitting atomic nuclei. In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt allocated $6,000 to start research on the possibility of the United States developing its own atomic weapon. After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Roosevelt signed a secret order authorizing the creation of an atomic bomb. The effort was code-named the Manhattan Project after the New York City headquarters of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

After scientists successfully created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction at a facility in Chicago in 1942, the government began allocating even more resources to the project. In July of 1945, the first successful test of an atomic bomb was conducted in the New Mexico desert. Less than a month later, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, helping bring about the end of the war and ushering in the nuclear age. More than 120,000 people at thirty research sites across the country were involved in working on the Manhattan Project. The total cost of the effort was estimated at about $2 billion.

Impact

The success of the Manhattan Project prompted more large-scale cooperation between government and science. In 1961, physicist Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, coined the term Big Science in an article in Science magazine. Weinberg defended the practice, comparing it to the creation of the pyramids of Egypt or the medieval cathedrals of Europe.

The increasing reliance on Big Science was spurred on in part by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, as both sides engaged in a contest of political and scientific one-upmanship. The competition to dominate the fledgling space race led the United States to develop the Apollo program, a decade-long effort to send a manned spaceflight to the moon. On July 20, 1969, the program accomplished its goal when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The cost of the mission was estimated to be about $23 billion and the project employed more than four hundred thousand people.

Another example of Big Science is the Human Genome Project. In 1988, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in cooperation with several international groups, began funding an effort to sequence, or "map," the molecules that make up human DNA. Because of the complexity of the DNA strands, the project was expected to take more than fifteen years to complete. Researchers at more than twenty laboratories around the world finished the project in 2003, two years ahead of schedule. The NIH estimated the total cost at $2.7 billion.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was supported with funds from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). LIGO is an observatory spread out over two sites in the United States—one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. LIGO is designed to detect gravity waves, distant ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by massive objects in space. The NSF funded the project at a cost of about $1.1 billion over forty years. In 2015, LIGO detected the first evidence of gravitational waves, which were originally predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. The observatory has gone on to make several other notable discoveries.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 16.8-mile ringed particle accelerator built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) three hundred feet below the ground on the border of France and Switzerland. The LHC, which operates on principles similar to Lawrence's cyclotron, uses almost ten thousand magnets to accelerate particles close to the speed of light. Scientists observe the collisions of these particles in an effort to understand the fundamental building blocks of matter. The project took almost twenty-five years to complete at a cost of about $10 billion.

Bibliography

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