On big science: a survey

Abstract

Scientific quest is driven by eternal human curiosity and the need to understand and explain unknown worlds. It is an endless process of extending current human knowledge with new insights, improved theories, and advances via discoveries and singular inflection points. Big Science denotes long lasting, high risk and extremely expensive projects addressing the big challenges and hard issues. Opinions are divided about the Big Science approach to scientific advances, and this short paper setts the ground for a discussion about the merits and perils of such an approach. We conclude with our belief that the changed technological circumstances, recent scientific achievements, and economic needs will likely lead to a new rise of experimental sciences. We believe that a combination of AI-inspired methods, digesting unprecedented volumes of data and exploiting the limitless capacities of computing clouds, will create new kinds of scientific instruments, tools, and collaborative environments, advancing theoretical insights via experimental proofs.