Alvin Weinberg — a towering figure in 91 history — coined the term “big science” in a 1961 article for the journal Science.
By then, Weinberg had already played an important role in the Manhattan Project, which was, at the time, the largest scientific undertaking in history. Working at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory and at Oak Ridge’s X-10 plant (which would later become ORNL), he helped develop the nuclear reactors that converted uranium into plutonium.
First as director of research at ORNL and then as lab director in the years that followed, he would oversee the development of several more research reactors, based on various nuclear technologies. These experiences with government-sponsored R&D projects no doubt shaped his perspective on large-scale scientific endeavors.
Cautionary questions
In his Science article, Weinberg alluded to “the monuments of Big Science — the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors” and posed three cautionary questions:
- Is big science ruining science?
- Is big science ruining us financially?
- Should we divert a larger part of our effort toward issues which affect human well-being more directly than big-science spectaculars such as manned space travel and high-energy physics?
“These questions are so broad, and so difficult,” he wrote, “that I cannot do more than raise them here. Since they involve the issue of the scientist's responsibility to his science and to his society, I believe I shall have done some service merely by urging scientists to think seriously about them.”
To some extent, Weinberg spent the remainder of his distinguished career addressing these questions.
Preserving the enterprise
“It took World War II and a national mission to create the big science enterprise that became the national laboratories,” said Bonnie Nestor, who served as special assistant to ORNL’s lab directors from 2001 until 2020.
“Alvin’s concern was preserving that. By the time he became lab director, he had figured out that nuclear energy was not going to be a mission that would keep the whole enterprise occupied. Very early on, he was looking at what else the national labs could do.”
In response, ORNL branched into related research areas that were, at least at first, directly related to its nuclear mission.
“The lab started the materials research program,” Nestor said, “because nuclear radiation affects materials, and they needed to know more about that to build nuclear reactors. Computing was brought in to advance lab scientists’ ability to calculate the parameters that were needed to build reactors and operate them safely. The biology program was started to study the effects of radiation on living organisms.”
The intervening decades have seen huge advances in science and in the technologies that support it. And, coincidentally or not, the scientific establishment seems to have made considerable progress in ensuring that Weinberg’s concerns about big science did not come to fruition.
“We have the advantage of hindsight, so we know how the science enterprise developed,” said Jim Roberto, formerly the lab’s science director.
“Both big and small science have grown, and the overall enterprise appears to be healthy. Small science has benefited from access to big science facilities — computers, neutron and X-ray sources, and nanoscale science centers — and many of the issues related to the possible neglect of life sciences have not materialized. Weinberg’s article raised some warnings, but the longer-term outcome has been positive.”
Indeed, ORNL’s original big science mission, far from ruining science, spawned research programs across the scientific spectrum, focused on neutron science, high-performance computing, advanced materials, biology and environmental sciences, national security and much more.
Several of the lab’s R&D facilities are themselves world-class big science projects. Costly? Yes. But they are shared each year with 5,000 in-person guest researchers and many others by way of high-speed network connections.
Our interconnected future
One of ORNL’s latest forays in the realm of big science is the Interconnected Science Ecosystem initiative, better known as INTERSECT. Among INTERSECT’s goals is to develop research instruments that can produce more and better data, enabling increasingly sophisticated studies, while automation and robotics analyze the datasets without constant human attention and intervention.
“Weinberg was talking and thinking about how we have these big challenges that affect us as a community, as a country and globally,” said Rob Moore, one of the initiative’s two directors, “but these are big-enough challenges that individual researchers are unable to solve them on their own.”
INTERSECT is taking this understanding into the future by incorporating 21st century tools such as artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced networking to extend researchers’ reach and supercharge their collaborations.
“It takes an interdisciplinary team with a range of expertise to solve these big science problems,” Moore said. “With this new way of doing science, we can start to use our AI and machine learning tools to help us accelerate the scientific discovery process.”
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit . — James (Jim) Pearce