Editing Big science (section)

== Definitions ==
"Big science" usually implies one or more of these specific characteristics:
*''Big budgets'': No longer required to rely on [[philanthropy]] or [[Private industry|industry]], scientists were able to use budgets on an unprecedented scale for basic research.
*''Big staffs'': Similarly, the number of practitioners of science on any one project grew as well, creating difficulty, and often controversy, in the assignment of credit for scientific discoveries (the [[Nobel Prize]] system, for example, allows awarding only three individuals in any one topic per year, based on a 19th-century model of the scientific enterprise).
*''Big machines'': [[Ernest Lawrence]]'s [[cyclotron]] at his [[Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory|Radiation Laboratory]] in particular ushered in an era of massive machines (requiring massive staffs and budgets) as the tools of basic scientific research. The use of ''many'' machines, such as the many sequencers used during the [[Human Genome Project]], might also fall under this definition.
[[File:Fermilab.jpg|thumb|right|Enormous [[superconducting]] [[synchrotron]] particle accelerators with circumferences of many kilometers are the exemplars of Big Science. Shown above is the [[Fermilab]] [[Tevatron]].]]
*''Big laboratories'': Because of the increase in cost to do basic science (with the increase of large machines), centralization of scientific research in large laboratories (such as [[Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]] or [[CERN]]) has become a cost-effective strategy, though questions over facility access have become prevalent.

Towards the end of the 20th century, not only projects in basic physics and astronomy, but also in [[life sciences]] became big sciences, such as the massive [[Human Genome Project]]. The heavy investment of government and industrial interests into academic science has also blurred the line between public and private research, where entire academic departments, even at public universities, are often financed by private companies.  Not all Big Science is related to the military concerns which were at its origins.