Big science

The need of a strong scientific research establishment was obvious in the shadow of the first atomic weapons to any country seeking to play a prominent role in world affairs.

[5] Many scientists also complain that the requirement for increased funding makes a large part of the scientific activity filling out grant requests and other budgetary bureaucratic activity, and the intense connections between academic, governmental, and industrial interests have raised the question of whether scientists can be completely objective when their research contradicts the interests and intentions of their benefactors.

Grant competitions, while they stimulate interest in a topic, can also increase secretiveness among scientists because application evaluators may value uniqueness more than incremental, collaborative inquiry.

[7] This was a response to Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, in which the departing U.S. president warned against the dangers of what he called the "military–industrial complex" and the potential "domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money".

Major themes include the evolution of experimental design, from table-top experiments to today's large-scale collider projects; accompanying changes in standards of evidence; and discourse patterns across researchers whose expertise only partially overlaps.

Galison introduced the notion of "trading zones," borrowed from the sociolinguistic study of pidgins, to characterize how such groups learn to interact.