Big Science Transformed: Science, Politics and Organization in Europe and the United States

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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
  ‘Big Science Transformed relies on a number of well-researched cases and contexts to show how Big Science has changed over the past decades resulting in new types of facilities built to satisfy new demands. Although the processes dissected in Hallonsten’s innovative analyses are complex and heterogeneous, he manages to put them in a coherent theoretical framework, thus staking out a whole new and intriguing direction for studies of Big Science.’ Thomas Kaiserfeld, Professor of History of Ideas and Sciences, Lund University, Sweden   In this remarkable book Hallonsten analyzes the changing role of Big Science from military applications to the grand challenges in today’s society, and from thetransition of accelerators for particle collisions to those dedicated for neutron and x-ray research. This is a scholarly book that every researcher in the field will benefit from but it also offers stimulating reading for non-experts about the role of Big Science in our daily life. Ingolf Lindau, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, USA, and Lund University, Sweden