Scientific Teams and Scientific Laboratories.
1970; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-6192
Autores Tópico(s)Scientific Computing and Data Management
ResumoScientific truths discovered in one age are essential for scientific prog ress in another: the laws of thermodynamics, discovered in the nine teenth century, will remain relevant and necessary for the scientist of the twenty-second century. Similarly scientific truth discovered in one place is required for scientific progress elsewhere: Lord Rutherford's ex periments at Manchester on the scattering of alpha particles led even tually to the prolific investigation of nuclear phenomena throughout the world. To paraphrase Alfred Korzybski, man the scientist is both a time binder and a space-binder. In this sense science has always been a cumulative, team activity, more than, say, the arts or literature.2 To be sure, great individual geniuses, like Newton or Maxwell or Darwin, create the revolutions that punctuate scientific progress. (T. S. Kuhn, in his The Structure of Sci entific Revolutions, calls these turning points in science paradigm-break ing.3 I shall refer to them, along with the more modest important dis coveries, simply as breakthroughs.) Yet the connections of even such individual geniuses with their predecessors and their contemporaries are surely more direct and demonstrable than is the connection between Beethoven and Mozart, or Picasso and Renoir. As Newton wrote to Rob ert Hooke, If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.4 Nineteenth-century science was mainly conducted by geographically isolated, though intellectually interacting, individuals; much of today's science is conducted by large interdisciplinary teams. These teams often center around pieces of expensive equipment and are then said to be part of science. Team science is characteristically conducted in the large multipurpose scientific laboratory, an institution that is predom inantly a phenomenon of World War II and after. My purpose will be first to trace the origins of big team science and to examine its multipur pose institutions, second to estimate the capacity of this new scientific style to launch and carry off the scientific breakthroughs so necessary 1056
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