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‘Big Science’ as a notion was coined in 1960 by physicist Alvin Weinberg and physicist-turned-historian Derek de Solla Price, and immediately became the center of heated discussions in the U.S. Simultaneously, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, a counterpart of the American discussion of Big Science was epitomized in the concept of Scientific-Technological Revolution, which became the center of a theoretically significant discussions focused on the conditions and consequences of scientific-technical, social and economic change in different political systems. Throughout the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union advocated their ability to offer and display different visions of a modern industrial society, and Big Science played major role in these powerful Cold War imageries. This chapter examines different ways in which Big Science was deployed as a resource to debate, negotiate, and rationalize the concerns and anxieties of the Cold War, on the opposite sides of the political divide. In both political settings, scientists, as well as social theorists, promoted the view that Big Science needs what might be called “Big Science Studies” – an independent expertise, which would provide a systematic assessment and characterization of Big Science, and advise governments accordingly.

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 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.

The unification of Germany in 1871 left universities under the control of individual states, but they had common national characteristics, and Prussian influence was strong. Expansion of university numbers enlarged the academic profession, though there were divisions between the established professors and the growing number without full chairs. The growth of the natural sciences was strong, and connected with the success of German industry. Some growth was directed into the more practical Technische Hochschulen. In the late 19th century, these sought the same rights as universities to award doctorates, with a parallel debate over whether modern as well as classical secondary education should qualify for university entry. By 1900 the modernists had got their way. The foundation of the Kaiser–Wilhelm–Gesellschaft in 1911 marked the arrival of 20th-century ‘big science’, and a departure from the old idea of the union of research and teaching.

Natural theologians who aim at confirming the theistic hypothesis by adducing empirical evidence are confronted by the dilemma of God-of-the-gaps. Either theism predicts no specific phenomena at all, or these phenomena may be accounted for in the future by superior scientific explanations, so that theism will be disconfirmed. A pessimistic induction concerning the history of science and natural theology will convince sophisticated natural theologians that they should avoid this risk of God-of-the-gaps. Richard Swinburne uses the following immunizing strategy: theism should purport to explain only phenomena that are either ‘too big’ or ‘too odd’ for science to explain. But this strategy fails with regard to miracles (too odd), as is argued by a detailed examination of the case of Christ’s bodily resurrection, and it is problematic with regard to instances of ‘too big’, such as fine-tuning, or the explanation of the universe as a whole.

Making use of newly available archival sources, this paper revisits a poorly understood episode in postwar Soviet science: the development of the N-1 super rocket designed to take Soviet cosmonauts to the Moon. Evidence from the N-1 complicates our received understanding of the phenomenon of Soviet “big science,” understood until now as singularly-minded, risk-averse projects that quelled dissent. Instead we find a process characterized by risk-taking, competition, and messiness, thus raising fundamental questions about the nature and efficacy of notions such as ‘big science’ in the Soviet context.

This chapter illuminates the place of biomedical sciences in the culture and society of 1920s Russia. It investigates the role that the new knowledge of human biology played in answering the “big” questions of human nature and human destiny (who are we? where we come from? and where are we going?), which had haunted humanity for millennia and assumed particular urgency in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. It demonstrates a particular cultural affinity of the Bolsheviks’ visions of the country’s future to the promises of eternal life and hopes for conquering death generated by concurrent biomedical research. It examines efforts of scientists, their Bolshevik patrons, and their literary fans/critics who collectively transformed esoteric, specialized biomedical knowledge into an influential cultural resource, a resource that facilitated the establishment of large specialized institutions for biomedical research, inspired numerous science-fiction stories, displaced religious beliefs, and gave the centuries-old dream of immortality new forms and new meanings in Bolshevik Russia.

In this chapter we review some of the ideas Max Boisot developed about the organizational and strategic aspects of big science projects and their application to the understanding of big science projects like ATLAS. First, we will look at some fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge and its differentiation from the concepts of data and information. Second, we have a look at Boisot's published research on big science, represented mainly by the article "Generating knowledge in a connected world: The case of the ATLAS experiment at CERN", reproduced in this book, and the book "Collisions and Collaboration". Issues in this part range from learning, culture or leadership to new management research models or e-science. Finally, we overview some of the ideas on which Boisot was working in the last months of his research about big science, and that may constitute avenues for future research.

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.

Chapter 5 – the last chapter – explores a particular technocultural dominant in each of the three nations studied, arguing that, to better understand the contextual characteristics of a culture, we have to deconstruct its Eurocentric entrapments. This chapter shows that the hierarchical and Euro/West-centric influence of scientific culture lies in a powerful paradox, whereby the “origin” of modern science is located in Europe, even while the role of location in scientific culture is erased. This chapter analyzes scientific culture as a product not of located and static national cultures, but, rather, of located and shifting entangled transnational histories. It shows how the cultures of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India were entangled within hierarchical networks of transnational, national, local, and laboratory policies and practices.

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.

The hierarchical and exclusionary characteristics of science impact not only different facets of technoscientific research, development, and deployment, but also their historiography. Because, for example, India has been considered a part of the “periphery,” almost nothing about MRI or NMR (from which MRI emerged) research in India is documented. An added consequence is that little is known about the genealogical links of recent transnational transformations that are making India an important site for technoscientific innovations. This chapter documents and analyzes NMR research in India from its beginnings in the late 1940s and maps its links to MRI research and development. It argues that empirical investigations of particular technoscientific trails in India (as elsewhere) not only lead to a very different understanding of the “center-periphery” relationship and the West versus non-West technocultural divide, but also allow a better understanding of present day technoscientific transformations.

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.

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.

Celebration of MRI as “the ultimate imaging technique” is today neither uncommon nor unwarranted. But, in the 1970s, scientists and nonscientists alike were unsure whether it could ever be developed. Apart from theoretical and technical difficulties, there were a variety of other issues and concerns that stood in the way of MRI's (it was not even called MRI then) emergence as a medical imaging technology. The birth of MRI, this chapter shows, was the outcome of a variety of unpredictable and contingent, albeit hierarchical, entanglements that stretched across both time and geography. It argues that distinctions between invention, development, and diffusion of technology are, in practice, messy and muddled. Different stages in the life cycle of a technology, as the history of MRI illustrates, are often folded onto each other. It also argues that, although contingent upon circumstances, the development of MRI was a hierarchical and exclusionary process. The transformation of MRI research into a “big science,” among other things, had the consequence of privileging some research groups and excluding others and as such it also had a dramatic impact on the transnational geography of MRI research and development.

In his novel His Master's Voice, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem poses perplexing questions about the nature of science, life, communication, and cosmology, and most especially about the strange and perverse creatures we humans are. Written in 1967, the book is set in America in the form of a memoir of a mathematician, Peter E. Hogarth, and concerns his work on the “His Master's Voice” project. This chapter takes the novel as another means of observing the epiphany of big science in American culture.