He describes the phenomenon that, at the time of the lectures, 80 to 90 percent of important scientific work had occurred in one normal human life span.
[1] With this facet in mind, he sets out to describe the development of the term "Big Science," as coined by Alvin M. Weinberg in 1961.
This assertion Price claims is the "fundamental law of any analysis of science," stating that it even holds accurately over long time periods.
This measure serves to show numerically how the majority of important science has taken place within the average human life span at the time of the lecture presentation.
[6] If this claim is correct, then the exponential growth rate previously observed must break down at a point in the future, and Price implies as a conclusion to this section that the onset of this breakdown may be associated with an upper bound to the size of science brought on by "Big Science.
He focuses on Galton's work concerning the distribution of high achieving scientists and statesmen in the upper echelons of British society, specifically Hereditary Genius and English Men of Science.
[9] Price moves next to define a quantity he calls someone's "solidness" s, as the logarithm of the total papers published in one scientist's life.
This chapter serves multiple purposes but overall achieves the same goal as the previous, providing a further conception of the productivity measure in science.
[11] With the emergence of this scientific social practice, seen not as a means of publishing new knowledge but of communication between practitioners, the process of situating papers within the general body of literature came in to play.
[17] Groups of scientists naturally form as a result of collaborations between individuals focusing on similar problems, but the ability for researchers to move around the globe in order to achieve interpersonal relationships with their fellow researchers is what Price suggests maximizes the group size able to keep up regular productive interactions.
As a general first statement, Price proposes that the cost of science has been increasing proportional to the square of the number of scientists.
The final conceptual measure that Price offers is the idea of the "mavericity" of a scientist, or the likelihood that an individual will test new and unique combinations of theories and experiments unexpected in the current literature.