chapter five

Big Science and the Transits of Venus

The First Race to Space

When history looks at the 20 th century, she will see science and technology as its theme; she
will find in the monuments of Big Science — the huge rockets, the high- energy accelerators,
the high- flux research reactors — symbols of our time just as surely as she finds Notre Dame
a symbol of the Middle Ages. She might even see analogies between the motivations for
building these tools of giant science and the motivations of the church builders and pyramid
builders.... We use our Big Science to add to our country’s prestige, they used their churches
for their cities’ prestige. (Weinberg 1961 , 161 )

T

he launch of the $ 3 billion US- funded Brain Activity Map project

(BAM) in early April 2013 seemed to corroborate a growing sense

that “Big Science” is making a comeback (Dimond 2013 ). BAM followed

the footsteps of the human genome project, the Large Hadron Collider,

the “Yellowstone” climate- change supercomputer, and the creation of a

European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden (Giudice 2012 ; Jacob and

Hallonsten 2012 ). Similarly, China’s second manned spaceflight in June

2013 and India’s launch of a Mars orbiter in November of that year offered

but the latest examples of a rejuvenation of space programs and poten-

tially of space races around the world (Bal 2013 ). Not surprisingly, the Big

Science debate was reignited as well. In September 2012 , Bruce Alberts,

the editor of Science, published a letter bemoaning the demise of small

science. His letter hit a nerve with many in the scientific community (Sills

2012 ). Much of the response repeated earlier premonitions that overreli-

ance on Big Science will lead to a world in which “the spectacular rather

than the perceptive becomes the scientific standard” (Hoyle 1964 ).

This recent resurgence comes at a time when the world’s leading powers

are recovering from a traumatic financial crisis that often resulted in the

imposition of controversial austerity programs (Blyth 2013 ). The continu-

ous governmental funding of multimillion- (and sometimes multibillion-)