150 chapter five
international prestige as a way for securing state funding. Transit expe-
ditions enhanced the visibility of the Royal Society just as the Human
Genome Project enhanced the visibility of biomedicine. Domestic and
international prestige structures are tightly connected and often reinforce
one another. Murray’s quest to find the perfect purple pigeon demon-
strates that many domestic Big Science entrepreneurs are acutely aware
of these interconnections and strategize their efforts accordingly.
At the end of the Cold War, under unipolarity, the international hier-
archy was relatively uncontested and unambiguous. Status signaling serves
little purpose in such an environment, and hence it is not surprising to
find a slight reduction in Big Science funding in this period. The picture is
murkier today. With the relative decline of the United States, the rise of
China, the ascent of the BRIC countries, and instability in Europe, the
international hierarchy is more contested than it has been in decades. This
is the precise environment in which conspicuous consumption thrives. It
is a time to create illusions, project images, and establish reputations. The
revival of Big Science makes sense within this broader context.
Big Science remains an attractive venue for conspicuous consumption
because it is an effective test of status. It incorporates all of Goffman’s
major restriction mechanisms: the exorbitant price of Big Science creates
effective intrinsic restrictions, the competitive nature of Big Science im-
poses natural restrictions, and the amount of time and training required
for the establishment of a viable scientific infrastructure capable of sup-
porting Big Science entails considerable cultivation restrictions. Science
serves as one of the most prominent markers of modernity, thus connect-
ing it to core values of many prestige spaces in the contemporary interna-
tional system. The competitive nature of Big Science generates important
focal points that increase the broadcast efficiency of status- seeking behav-
ior. Landing on the moon, finally decoding the human genome, a success-
ful nuclear test: all these provide threshold moments that are bound to at-
tract international attention. Big Science is not geared toward the gradual
and largely esoteric processes of research and knowledge accumulation
but rather toward the production of spectacle.
In 1882 , William Harkness ( 1837 – 1903 ), probably the biggest American
supporter of transit observations, tried to imagine the world of science that
would greet Venus on its next voyage across the sun.
We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be
no other till the twenty- first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and