Yearbook of Science and the Future 1994 [antikvár]

ROBERT P. CREASE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of t^ew York at Stony Brook and Historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York. (Overleaf) Illustration by Kathryn Diffley This is an era of sprawling scientific megaprojects. Topping the list is space station Freedom^ which in 1984 was estimated to cost $8 billion and to have a vehicle in orbit by 1992. Still firmly on the ground in 1993, it is now projected to cost $40 billion to build and $100 billion to operate over a 30-year life span. The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator under construction outside Waxahachie, Texas, will cost an estimated $8 billion or more by its completion around 1999. The Human Genome Project, launched in 1988 to map and sequence all the genes in the human organism, is a 15-year, $3 billion effort to which over half a dozen foreign countries have pledged substantial contributions. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, took a dozen years to build and put into orbit and cost $1.5 bilhon. Each space shutde flight costs about $1 billion. Numerous other scientific fields have multiyear, multidisciplinary, multinational projects whose price tags approach the $ 1 billion mark. Over three decades ago the trend toward large and expensive scientific projects was baptized Big Science, in a rough analogy with big business. Heated arguments have erupted ever since over the virtues and vices of this development. Does Big Science represent a dramatic new phase in the practice of science, fraught with dangers we barely recognize and possibly heralding a decline in the quafity of science? Or does it represent simply the next stage in a natural evolution, a stage whose scale is simply a function of the questions we are now able to ask and whose arrival is neither unexpected nor unwanted and even offers unprecedented opportunities? Both positions were advanced at the vety beginning of the debate—the first by the scientist who coined the phrase, the second by the science historian who popularized it. Dangers and opportunities The author of the phrase was Alvin Weinberg, an articulate if sometimes iconoclastic physicist who at the time was director of Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratory. On May 4, 1961, Weinberg used it in an address on the potential dangers to science and society of large-scale scientific ventures such as giant particle accelerators and the manned space program. The speech was delivered to a meeting of the American Rocket Society, which fell, as it happened, the day before Alan Shepard's suborbital ride in Freedom 7 to become the first American to blast into space. "I wasn't very popular," Weinberg recalled about the reaction of his audience. Still, when the address, "Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States," was reprinted in the journal Science two months later, few disputed the justice of Weinberg's comments, and the article was enormously influential. At the time, neither of the two principal examples of Big Science that Weinberg discussed had really matured. Forefi'ont particle accelerators could still be built at universities, and Project Mercury was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, in hindsight Weinberg managed to diagnose several dangers that lay ahead for these and projects of a similar scale, including 10