Notes on the New Big Science

Robert Crease and Catherine Westfall, in their article “The New Big Science” (Physics Today, May 2016, page 30 ), describe how materials science has taken over national laboratory facilities formerly occupied by high-energy particle physics. That is an interesting transition for materials science. But unfortunately, the claim that “Big Science isn’t what it used to be” seems true only in a more limited sense than the title implies.

As the authors note, US particle physics is now carried out mainly abroad. But the focus on ever-larger accelerators has simply moved to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The LHC’s community of 10 000 and annual budget of $1 billion dwarf the materials science effort at Brookhaven National Laboratory. ¹

Crease and Westfall acknowledge that their discussion omits astronomy. But the huge 30-meter-class telescopes and the 4-meter-aperture solar instrument are presently the main arena for Big Science in the US (reference ; see also Physics Today, October 2005, page 30 ). The article also doesn’t mention how university plasma research has been marginalized since the 1970s by increasingly large fusion machines, their growth culminating in the deeply troubled ITER project. Overall, I doubt that a more balanced analysis would support the view that Big Science has changed meaningfully.

The authors do not mention that US particle physics left the national labs precisely because the discipline was devastated by the termination of the overly ambitious Superconducting Super Collider in 1993. Hundreds left the field, once the flagship of US science, for astronomy or to work for hedge funds. ³ It is troubling that now Big Astronomy is following the same precarious path, closing even large telescopes to build a few behemoths. ⁴

The authors describe well the increased complexity of materials science at the national labs. Perhaps that community can, in time, learn to manage the complexity in ways that will guide others to the benefits of Big Science while avoiding its dangers.