big science and the transits of venus 151
the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit season occurred
the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that won-
drous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was
just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season
arrives. God only knows. (Dick, Orchiston, and Love 1998 , 249 – 50 )
Harkness would have surely been amazed to see rockets carrying men
and women into space, scientists decoding the most fundamental secrets
of life, and physicists harnessing powerful energies capable of destroying
the earth. Yet Harkness might have been equally amazed to discover that
throughout all these scientific transformations, the politics of Big Science
that he was all too familiar with remained largely unchanged. Thus, the
blooming June flowers of 2004 that welcomed Venus on its transit across
the sun were also welcoming the potential emergence of yet another Big
Science race, this time to faraway planets. In the world of conspicuous
consumption, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
