Originally published 14 July 1986
It has been less than 50 years since Ernest Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron. Lawrence’s first particle accelerating machine was four inches in diameter and constructed from window pane, brass plate, and sealing wax. It was the sort of thing any clever fellow could build in his basement.
If you want to do basic particle physics today, you will have to come up with $5 billion dollars for an accelerator with energies 10 million times higher than those achieved by Lawrence with his first machines.
Today’s high-energy particle physicists have their eye on a machine called the Superconducting Super Collider. It will be contained in a tunnel 50 miles in diameter and will accelerate particles to energies of 20 trillion electron volts (an electron volt is the amount of energy that could be imparted to a proton by a single flashlight battery).
Obviously, this is not the sort of gizmo you can build in your basement. If you want to work with the Superconducting Super Collider, you will have to make yourself part of that elite group of high-energy particle physicists who will have exclusive access to the machine if and when it is built.
The Superconducting Super Collider is only the most dramatic example of the tendency in science toward bigger and more expensive instrumentation. The day when a Michael Faraday could discover fundamental laws of electromagnetism with only a few coils of wire and a magnet is past. The day when a rich amateur like James Joule could put together a few paddle-wheels and pulleys and verify conservation of energy is gone forever. Experimental research in almost every field of science today takes big bucks.
Little genius at disadvantage
A glance at the instrument ads in Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, tells the story:
“Discover the power of the ACAS 470.”
“Think what you could do now, if you use FPLC.”
“The Sorvall RC-Ultras — A whole new way to save time.”
“Finally, a thermospray LC/MS for less than $150,000.”
If you are an academic researcher and you want an ACAS 470, or FPLC, or an RC-Ultra, or an LC/MS, you will need more money than you are likely to get from the college bursar. And if you don’t have one on those devices, the researcher next door is going to get the job done first. In science, priority is everything.
What all of this means is that there is a real change going on in the way science is done. Research is increasingly dependent upon government funding or the promise of a big commercial payoff. The independent genius, like Faraday, Joule, or Lawrence, doesn’t have a chance. Today, a paper in the field of high-energy particle physics may have as many a hundred co-authors. What any one author contributed is anybody’s guess.
Writing in American Scientist, Philip Abelson, the co-discoverer of the element Neptunium, suggests that the cost of research is driving academic researchers into three camps.
One group forms the teams that use the facilities of big science — the accelerating machines, the telescopes, the supercomputers. They spend considerable time away from the campus and have little contact with students.
The second group includes those who have received grants or contracts to do work on campus. They usually supervise a group of graduate students or post-doctoral fellows, but they spend a substantial part of their time managing projects, writing reports, and seeking grants or grant renewals.
Priorities and glamor
The third group consists of those whose grant applications have gone unfunded. Often, they are unable to get support from their institutions for even modest programs.
Some critics believe that the tendency toward big science is not necessary. They concede that a Superconducting Super Collider ($5 billion) or a Hubble Space Telescope ($1.5 billion) is glamorous, but they maintain that the money could be more usefully spent by supporting a broader range of research on a more modest scale. Other scientists insist that the first priority is to explore the frontiers of knowledge, regardless of the cost.
There are some heartening trends away from the science of big bucks. The earth-bound astronomers have learned how to use clever computer-based technologies to build bigger telescopes more cheaply than anyone would have thought possible only 10 years ago. And bigger and faster computers continue to get cheaper and cheaper.
And of course there are always the theoreticians. Einstein could work out the secrets of the universe on the back of an envelope. I have a friend, a theoretician working on the foundations of quantum mechanics, who has been blissfully content for 15 years with a pencil and a notebook. In science, the cheapest and best instrument may always be the human brain.
