---
title: "Little Science, Big Science"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Science,_Big_Science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:33:03.600077+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Little Science, Big Science is a book of collected lectures given by Derek J. De Solla Price, first published in 1963. The book presents the 1962 Brookhaven National Laboratory Pegram Lectures, a series of lectures dedicated to discussing science and its place in society. Price's goal in the lectures is to outline what it may look like for science to be analysed scientifically, by applying methods of measuring, hypothesizing, and deriving to science itself. With this goal in mind, he sets out to define quasi-mathematically how the shape and size of science has shifted from "small science" to "big science" in a historical and sociological way. Price presents a quantification of science as a measurable entity via an analogy to thermodynamics, conceptualizing science like a gas with individual molecules possessing individual velocities and interactions, a total volume, and general properties or laws.

== Prologue to a Science of Science ==
Price begins the lectures by setting forth a demarcation in science centered around the modern period. 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. 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. As a general directive, he seeks to show that the transition from "Little Science" to "Big Science," specifically the socio-economic and methodological changes to science in the 20th century, have been mostly gradual. To illustrate this point, he presents empirical statistical evidence from various aspects and fields of science, all of which show that the mode of growth of science is exponential, growing at compound interest. This assertion Price claims is the "fundamental law of any analysis of science," stating that it even holds accurately over long time periods. With this fundamental law in mind, he states that for general measures the size of science in manpower or number of publications doubles in size every 10 to 15 years. If this rate of expansion is considered broadly, then from the 1600s until now such size measures of science have increased by a factor of 106. From this observation, Price moves to describe the "coefficient of immediacy:" the number of scientists alive compared to the number of scientists who have ever been, a ratio or percentage he states as 7:8 and 87.5% respectively. 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. As a result of the consistent exponential growth rate and immediacy of science, the statement that the majority of scientists throughout history are alive at any given moment must be consistent throughout history as well, meaning that in 1700 the majority of all scientists ever were alive, true also for 1800 and 1900 and so on. As a result of this facet, Price states that science has been constantly exploding into the population, increasing its size at a rate faster than the increase of total humans able to conduct it.
However, Price asserts that this exponential growth rate cannot simply explain the transition from "Little Science" to "Big Science," as the constant growth would not make the modern period under question any more likely to produce "Big Science" than any other. He conjectures that two statistical phenomena hold true for science generally, that individual metrics of science may grow at rates different from that of the exponential growth, and that the exponential growth rate may be starting to diminish. In response to his second point, he claims that the normal exponential growth may give way to a logistic growth rate, growing exponentially until it reaches a maximum size and then ceasing to grow. The possibility that science follows a rate of growth modeled by a logistic curve is suggested further by the fact that if science had continued to grow at an exponential rate in 1962, then by now there would be more scientists than people. With his claim that the growth rate actually observes a logistic curve, he provides a second basic law of the analysis of science, namely that the exponential growth rates previously mentioned must be in fact logistic. 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."