Big Science Quotes

“The future of Big Science appears to depend on industry, whose R&D priorities are very different from those of universities, research foundations, and government.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“The great ideas arise when you give freedom,” declared the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver—“freedom to think, freedom from other pressures—to individuals of great intellectual capacity . . . and let them be motivated primarily by their curiosity to find out how nature operates.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“It was Ernest Lawrence, for instance, who elevated engineers to coequal status in the accelerator lab—physicists in Europe, by contrast, “tended to shun the ‘dirty’ details of engineering,” which surely accounted for Europe’s lagging behind the United States in accelerator technology, though”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“The second was Yale’s complacent refusal to accommodate its sought-after assistant professor’s request for a promotion to associate professor. Such rapid advancement cut against the grain in New Haven. Ernest’s academic superiors were unable to see past his youth, much”
― Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“The department placed its quandary in the hands of two junior professors, Loeb and Raymond T. Birge, who devised a new strategy of snaring scientific prodigies on their way up, before they had a chance to cement themselves into comfortable sinecures elsewhere.”
― Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“Campbell could not disagree with Europeans’ condescending view of American science as a backwater rich in money and manpower but poor in theoretical understanding.”
― Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex