Big Science is seductive. It exerts a draw on the imagination that goes beyond purely rational considerations. If you’re romantic about science, Big Science offers some of the most colorful characters, the most dramatic breakthroughs, the boldest public commitments. These projects are breathtaking societal moments, rare points when science broke from its usual staid, plodding, incremental mode and did something dramatically different.
Big Science is also tangible in a way that a lot of scientific progress is not. You can point to Los Alamos in a perfectly midwit way and say “The Science Happens Here.” Big Science – or at least the dream of it – packages up progress in a way that is concrete, amenable to policy, something we can spend money on.
I also suspect that, for many, there is a little daydream imagining what it would have been like to be part of something historic like Apollo 11. We should have the bravery to admit that sometimes what underlies an obsession with Big Science is a longing to create such opportunities for ourselves in the present.
This Big Science imaginary haunts science and technology policy. The pantheon is well-known: Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, DARPA, Apollo, CERN, the Manhattan Project, Operation Warp Speed. We grasp for these templates when thinking about how the government should play a role in advancing progress.
We need a DARPA for X! An Apollo Program for Y! A Manhattan Project for Z!
But this infatuation with Big Science as the pinnacle of government involvement in progress can also be corrosive. A love of Big Science can be an obsession about means that causes us to lose sight of the ends.