Big Science Transformed

This book analyses the emergence of a transformed Big Science in Europe and the United States, using both historical and sociological perspectives. It shows how technology-intensive natural sciences grew to a prominent position in Western societies during the post-World War II era, and how their development cohered with both technological and social developments. At the helm of post-war science are large-scale projects, primarily in physics, which receive substantial funds from the public purse. *

• Big Science Transformed shows how these projects, popularly called 'Big Science', have become symbols of progress. It analyses changes to the political and sociological frameworks surrounding publicly-funding science, and their impact on a number of new accelerator and reactor-based facilities that have come to prominence in materials science and the life sciences. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will be of great interest to historians, sociologists and philosophers of science.

  Offers an examination of Big Science from the Cold War era, and military-industrial complex laboratories, to the present economically driven organizations Provides an ambitious conceptual framework for the study of contemporary Big Science Provokes interdisciplinary discussions about the role of science in society

  Autorentext
  Olof Hallonsten is a Researcher at Lund University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He is a sociologist of science whose areas of expertise are the politics and organization of science and modern history of science. He has published several works on the topic of large-scale scientific instrumentation and its political and organizational aspects.

  Inhalt
  Chapter 1. Introduction and Framework.- Chapter 2. History and Politics.- Chapter 3. Organization.- Chapter 4. Resilience and Renewal.- Chapter 5. Users and Productivity.- Chapter 6. Socio-Economic Expectations and Impacts.- Chapter 7. The Implications of Transformation.