Working Conference on the History of Big Science, August 25-28, 1988, in Palo Alto, California

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"Big Science" in which scientific research most typically must be carried out by a large team of scientists and technicians and which frequently is organized around extraordinarily expensive and large instruments has been a part of some sciences for centuries. The great expeditions of exploration of the 18th and 19th centuries -- Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, for example, or the Lewis and Clarke Expedition or the voyages of discovery of Captain Cooke in the South Pacific -- are in a sense "big science" projects. The large telescopes built in the 19th and early 20th centuries represent another kind of "big science." The current paradigm of big science, however, is represented by the giant particle accelerators in high energy physics. In truth, however, big science is becoming pervasive throughout science and it has become increasingly clear that to establish a more effective policy for science, we need a better understanding how "big science" works and how it affects the social organization of science. Historians of science have increasingly become interested in the development of big science since World War II and there is now a substantial group of scholars at work on topics in this area. Dr. Peter Galison, one of the leaders of this area of study in the history of science, has organized a working conference in order to compare and synthesize findings from several different case studies. From these case studies, he hopes to discuss methodological issues and the wider implications of this work, and to bring together science administrators and historians of business and technology with historians of science in order to gain a broader perspective on this problem. The conference will be held August 25 to 27 at Stanford University. The results will be published.