Alvin M. Weinberg has played a key role in scientific developments of the 20th century. In 1941 he joined the University of Chicago group that developed the first chain reactor. As a member of this team, he worked on the reactor that produced the plutonium that would ultimately be used for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. He served as director of ORAU's Institute for Energy Analysis (IEA), which pioneered investigations of the greenhouse effect, alternate energy sources, and maximizing energy sources at minimum cost to the economy and the environment. Throughout his career, Weinberg has been a leading figure in the development of nuclear energy. Among his accomplishments was the proposal to use pressurized water for nuclear submarine propulsion. Weinberg has been recognized many times, winning the Atoms for Peace Award, the Harvey Prize, the Heinrich Award, and the Fermi Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In addition to his writings concerning scientific and administrative works, he is also a prolific writer on the interaction between modern technology and society. He has coined many phrases that have become part of our everyday language; "big science," "technological fix," and "faustian bargain" are just a few examples. May of his earlier essays are published in this book, Reflections on Big Science. These essays treat a number of acute or chronic problems and many prescribe remedies. Included are considerations of the population expansion and the concomitant expansion of energy and information, the new social structures built by the new technology, the effects of the organization and financing of Big Science on the nature of scientific inquiry, the potential contribution of the federal laboratories to science education, and the role of the scientist (which is distinct from, and as vital as, the role of the documentalist) is closing the Information Gap.

A gathering of essays answering fundamental questions about the changes in science, by one of its keenest observers.

This is a collection of important lecture and original articles and commentaries by Martin Perl, discoverer of the tau lepton and the third generation of elementary particles, and this year''s Nobel Prize winner. This book contains a fascinating and realistic picture of experimental science based on the high energy physics research work carried out by him. Using reprints of his articles with his commentaries, the author presents the various aspects of experimental research in science: the pleasures and risks of experimental work; the pain and frustration with experiments that are useless or fail; the dreaming about experiments that were not carried out; the constant search for innovation and creativity in the work; and the special joy of discovery. The articles and commentaries range from the early days of bubble chambers and spark chambers in the 1950''s to the author''s present research, experiments at an electron-positron collider and a search for free quarks. The book is for the general reader as well as the scientist.

This book investigates the political history of Big Science in Europe in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, characterised by the founding histories of two collaborative, single-sited facilities namely the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (European XFEL) in Schenefeld, Germany. Under the heading of the other Europe, this book presents the history and politics of European Big Science as an alternative road to (Western) European integration besides the mainstream political integration process of the European Economic Community and the European Union. It shows that Big Science has a role to play in European politics and policymaking and that the crucial and unavoidable symbiosis between science, technology and politics brings the creation of Big Science projects back to geopolitical realities.

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.