---
title: "Little Science, Big Science"
chunk: 3/3
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"
---

== Political Strategy for Big Scientists ==
The final section of the lectures focuses on a larger-picture analysis of science and the monetary trends within it. As a general first statement, Price proposes that the cost of science has been increasing proportional to the square of the number of scientists. He points out that the cost of research in terms of the GDP did not increase in the years preceding World War II, yet afterward began increasing at the rate previously mentioned. As research amounts increase, the current and necessary number of researchers increases, promoting the inducement of scientists with higher salaries and better facilities in turn increasing the overall costs of science. Price suggests that it is this feedback loop that is a potential decelerator for the growth of science, and the main difference between Little Science and Big Science. What follows is his analysis of the "explosion of science" within non-developed countries, specifically Japan. He shows through this analysis that the United States' lack of experience of this explosion of science within the 20th century up to this point is due to the saturation of society with the activities of science, nearing costs not maintainable by the country. In countries where science has not yet reached an exponential growth curve, this saturation is not present, which allows the growth rate to set out at an exponential pace.
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. The reactions and interactions within science to this mavericity also characterizes Big Science over Little Science, where the former serves to limit and restrain the most maverick investigators due to collaborative work and specific directed goals for scientific research. Thus the emergence of Big Science not only influences the growth rate, connectedness, and significance of science, but also the individual facets of the scientific pursuit.

== References ==