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This chapter examines the connection between extravagant state-funded scientific megaprojects—known as Big Science—and international prestige by focusing on the Transits of Venus (TOVs). It first provides an overview of the international reaction to China's 2003 launch of the spacecraft Shenzhou V and whether it raised the prospects for a renewed space race before discussing Big Science projects such as space programs and ambitious biomedical projects like the Human Genome Project as examples of conspicuous consumption. It then considers Big Science in relation to prestige and three primary utility-based alternatives that explain Big Science as strategic investment, as a promoter of knowledge, and as pork-barrel politics, arguing that conspicuous consumption is a necessary complementary component for the analysis of Big Science. It also describes the international race to observe the TOVs of 1761, 1769, 1874, and 1882 as a case study of conspicuous consumption.

This chapter reviews distinctions between kinds of science, which is especially relevant to the book’s topic because it is an area that Karl Popper did not consider in detail. This creates a problem since critics of the hypothesis often do not distinguish between true hypothesis-based science and other kinds that don’t depend on hypotheses, and the traditional divisions of science miss the main points. The chapter distinguishes among several modern kinds of science including Big Science/Small Science and how they relate to Big Data and Little Data, and why Discovery Science is different from hypothesis-testing science. It separates “exploratory” from “confirmatory” studies and explains why this terminology can create confusion in trying to understand science. The differences between applied and basic science are genuine and meaningful because these two kinds of science have different goals and apply different, though overlapping, standards to achieve their goals.

Recognizing that US taxpayers would not cover the entire SSC cost, the Bush Administration began trying to internationalize the laboratory by seeking large foreign contributions. But the only serious prospect was Japan, which was initially hesitant to commit to such a partnership. In 1990, before the extent of the cost overrun was fully recognized, the US House of Representatives capped the federal SSC contribution at $5 billion while requiring at least 20 percent foreign contributions. When estimated total costs grew to $8.25 billion, this stipulation meant that a total of $1.7 billion was needed from other countries. That summer, amendments to terminate the SSC were defeated by comfortable margins in both House and Senate despite worsening public perceptions of the project. But thus chastened, high Administration officials redoubled their efforts that fall to secure a billion-dollar Japanese commitment but obtained only a promise to consider partnering in the SSC laboratory.

This chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow. It describes a series of workshops in which the ATLAS Collaboration was explored with the collaboration's project leaders from a managerial perspective. The idea of these workshops, sponsored by the ATLAS management, was to impart a more strategic orientation to the collaboration's efforts. It did not quite work out that way, and the reasons for this have much to teach about the nature of Big Science. It turns out that the managers of knowledge-intensive organizations may have more to learn from how Big Science projects such as ATLAS are developed and run than the other way round.

This chapter examines the ATLAS Collaboration from a leadership perspective. It first looks at how leadership in general may be conceptualized and then at how the concepts play out in the realm of science. Like other Big Science projects, the ATLAS Collaboration operates at the forefront of knowledge creation. The kind of leadership it requires is not vested in a single individual but is distributed throughout the collaboration. ATLAS's project management team has little formal control over the 3,000-plus members of the collaboration. These remain attached to national institutions and are accountable only to them. How, then, does a scientific collaboration as large as ATLAS generate and sustain creative and constructive interactions among several thousand scientists and engineers of diverse cultures, traditions, and habits? And, given the complexity of the tasks involved, how does it align such interactions with its experimental goals while keeping the project's stakeholders happy?

This chapter focuses on the inter- and intraorganizational dynamics that characterizes Big Science. It shows, first, that the high stakes associated with a unique, next-generation particle physics experiment will lead actors to collaborate and share resources; secondly, that, given the uncertainties, a loosely coupled institutional framework is essential for the pursuit of such a collaborative approach. The way that the ATLAS Collaboration deals with the collective action problem holds valuable lessons for all organizations — commercial, government, voluntary, and so on — involved in the production of knowledge in the 21st century. The chapter begins by exploring the nature of collective strategies and the varying degrees of collaboration they engender from a theoretical perspective. It then briefly describes the functioning of the ATLAS Collaboration as a collective practice. In a discussion section, it brings theory and description together in order to make sense of such a practice. It concludes with a brief look at the implications of the analysis of Big Science collaborations for the scientific enterprise as a whole and for science-based commercial collaborations in particular.

This chapter revisits themes of magnitude first articulated in the book’s second chapter, comparing the state of megasystems in the 1980s to those of the twenty-first century. In so doing, it recognizes the often-discussed prescience of Big Science and Laurie Anderson’s work in general. In a final analytic move, the chapter argues that Big Science structurally gestures beyond itself, modeling to listeners a reality or a way of being in which they might be free from the grip of the world’s ubiquitous megasystems.

The collective effort required to develop, build, and run the ATLAS detector has been structured as a ‘collaboration’, a distributed problem-solving network characteristic of Big Science, itself a relatively recent kind of enterprise involving big budgets, big staffs, big machines, and numerous laboratories. While ATLAS is an archetypical example of this type of enterprise in high-energy physics (HEP), similar endeavours can be found in basic physics, astronomy, and the life sciences. This chapter presents research that investigates the development and construction of the complex technological system that makes up the ATLAS detector.

This chapter offers the first in-depth musical analysis of Big Science’s first half. Using the paradigms of chronos and kairos explained earlier, it uncovers historical origins, intertextualities, structural characteristics, and the remarkable signs of the songs. Tracks discussed are “From the Air,” “Big Science,” “Sweaters,” “Walking and Falling,” and “Born, Never Asked.”

Big Science (and Big Humanities) were invented in the nineteenth century. Two huge, expensive, and long-lived projects, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) of the classical philologists and the Carte du Ciel of the astronomers, created disciplinary archives intended to serve future researchers for centuries and even millennia to come. The CIL would transcribe and publish all known Latin inscriptions from the length and breadth of the ancient Roman empire before they succumbed to the depredations of time. The Carte du Ciel would use the new methods of astrophotography to create a photograph of the sky as seen from the earth circa 1900, which future astronomers could use to detect phenomena that unfolded on a superhuman timescale. Both projects involved international cooperation, industrial-style organization, state funding, and disciplinary stamina on an unprecedented scale. Both raise questions about the investment of resources: why create the archives for future research instead of channeling energies and funds into present inquiry, especially when the topics of future research are uncertain? The answer lies in the melancholy realization of second-wave positivism that the price of progress was ephemeral scientific knowledge. Only the archives seemed to promise permanence.

This chapter explores the importance of magnitude as a theme in Laurie Anderson’s work, particularly Big Science. It begins by tracing histories of the titular phrase and then investigates the semiotics of bigness. Particularly with reference to individual identity, big systems, big edifices, and big collections of data all suggest superhuman states of consciousness. Accordingly, big knowledge systems such as linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the occult are all discussed. The chapter then reconciles their superhuman scale (and the attendant kinds of awareness it implies) with the paradoxical fact that such tokens of bigness are themselves human-made. Throughout, it draws connections between these notions and the album.

This interstitial chapter considers the discourse of postmodernism as it applies to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. Placing the concept in its historical context, the chapter ultimately downplays postmodernism, using Sara Ahmed’s feminist critique of its apparent relevance to “everything.” In recognizing what postmodernism fails to encompass or relate to, the chapter likewise notices the qualities of everythingness on the album and points out the gaps and cracks therein. It also takes up the circa 1982 concerns of the vinyl LP as a physical medium for music.

This chapter articulates how Laurie Anderson’s work obscures its own origins and processes. After providing an overview of her biography and output (most notably, the Big Science LP), it declares an intent to find a “now” in the music. In this case, “now” refers simultaneously to the now of the album’s circa-1980 making (chronos), the now of our hearing it moment by moment (kairos), and the cultural now of the twenty-first century. As an introduction to the book, the chapter also describes the structure, methodology, and audience for the total volume.

This chapter offers a reception history of Big Science, showing the ways listeners constellated the album within fields of genre. In doing so, it offers a definition of genre that differentiates between concerns of audience and concerns of style, framing generic tags as the provisional result of ongoing negotiations between musical stakeholders. In particular, the chapter asks how listeners heard Big Science as either new music or new wave. It unpacks the aesthetics and underlying ethics of both of those genres, highlighting their overlap in concerns of timbre, race, gender, geography, and low-context aesthetics.

This chapter offers the first in-depth musical analysis of Big Science’s second half. Using the paradigms of chronos and kairos explained in chapter 1, it uncovers historical origins, intertextualities, structural characteristics, and the remarkable signs of the songs. Tracks discussed are “O Superman,” “Example #22,” “Let X = X,” and “It Tango.” Particularly noteworthy is the new historical research into the origins of “O Superman,” Laurie Anderson’s top-charting and most well-known song.

This concluding chapter presents the vision for a global biogeography, arguing that biogeography is a Big Science which deserves the attention and resources given to other large-scale, global scientific efforts. Global projects can accelerate species discovery, taxon and area descriptions, and cybertaxonomy, and can set a standard for collaborative scientific research in the twenty-first century.

In a very personal reflective essay, Marzio Nessi, the technical coordinator of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, recounts Max Boisot’s work and interaction with the particle physics community at ATLAS and CERN, whose research on the Higgs particle, the famous “God particle”, has attracted a lot of media attention. Boisot was interested in the creation of knowledge at ATLAS and studied its unique organization, characterized by collaborative behavior, a bottom-up approach, and a consensus-driven management style, which has enabled this Big Science institution to create a new way of dealing with extreme complexity. Boisot was fascinated by how a scientific collaboration as large as ATLAS generates and sustains creative and constructive interactions among thousands of researchers from diverse cultures, traditions and habits. He believed that the self-organizational capability of the collaboration was the key to success. Boisot’s research also laid the ground for studying how scientific and technical progress is made and how the value of basic research can be captured for society.