Modern Science Vs Big Science Essay

From the most obvious or simplified version of history, the 20th century made a clearly distinct jump in scientific advancements compared to any other period in humankind. Modern innovations such as nuclear power plants, the digital computer, or multi-billion dollar space shuttles seem to generate from a collective source that began in the early 1900s and onwards. What caused such rapid leaps to be made within such widely diverse fields of science? By all accounts, historians of science relate this massive leap to the practice of “big science”, as opposed to the previously traditional “little science”. But a distinct flow of events shifted this practice of “little science” to the behemoth-sized “big science”. One of the main focuses and concerns of modern science lies in how to balance out these two methods of practice. While benefits and drawbacks seem to stem from both, proponents for either argument provide enough evidence that big and little science should certainly not exist without each other. This paper however, will ignore the semantics of a specific …show more content…
Coincidentally, CERN also became a major contributor to the development of the World Wide Web in its earliest stages. Computer scientist Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the use of hypertext and its protocols, with CERN providing the necessary host servers. They envisioned that scientists all over the world could collectively contribute and gather information from these host servers. Certainly, the simple argument that big science itself contains unscientific goals cannot automatically sway the justified balance of big and little. On the other hand, little science has existed for the majority of human history and provided excellent results. Both big science and little science are legitimate forms of practice in themselves, with the former at the very least evolving from its misnomer of bureaucratic