Big trouble with big science.

Congress has finally killed the monstrously expensive supercollider (estimated cost: $4.4 billion in 1987, $11 billion and climbing at last report), a move which dismayed particle physicists and pleased almost everyone else.

Professor Yasar Onel, a University of Iowa physicist, was one who lamented its demise, as the supercollider would have included 11 Iowa physicists in the research and, revealingly, they would have been "on the receiving end of major grants for years to come," as reporter Tom Walsh wrote.

Exactly. Big science is horrendously expensive. Leon H. Lederman, pleading in the New York Times for supercollider funding, made as good an argument as one could for why it deserved to be junked. Lederman listed six revolutions in scientific thinking which opened new and illuminating windows for our understanding of the universe. Yet, blinkered by his infatuation with costly physical science, he omitted the greatest discoverer of all--Charles Darwin--whose paradigm of evolution changed our view of our place in nature as powerfully as Copernicus and Galileo (also omitted) changed our view of our place in the cosmos.

Lederman stated his hope that we can learn to live "in harmony with a universe we understand." Understanding evolution can lead us toward that goal better than any physical science. We evolved from and are part of the living fabric we so recklessly shred. We won't survive unless we learn from evolution how interconnected life is and how to live in harmony with nature and with each other in a biota and a social structure we understand.

Big science, it was claimed, would require (in the 1990s alone) $60 billion for equipment and another $100 billion for the armies of technicians to tend it. Meanwhile, biological science is increasingly underfunded and inadequately taught--a deplorable situation which will worsen as tenacious right-wing Christians sneakily gain seats on school boards in order to wreak havoc on education in general and the teaching of evolution in particular. Thanks to wretched texts and (all too often) wretched teaching, America's already dismal rate of scientific literacy will further decline. Yet, instead of doing something about this national scandal, scientists--when they aren't publishing incomprehensible jargon for other specialists or composing applications for lucrative grants--sit on their hands.

Lederman apparently believes that big is better. As he told a New York Times interviewer several years ago: "Bigness is an inevitable component of the evolution in science and we must learn to live with it." Actually, however, big science has fulfilled the lament Robert Graves wrote in 1967:

Scientific research has become so complicated and demands such enormous apparatus that only the State or immensely rich patrons can pay for it, which in practice means that a disinterested search for knowledge is cramped by the demand for results that will justify the expense.... Moreover, the corpus of scientific knowledge ... has grown so unwieldly that not only are most scientists ignorant of even the rudiments of more than one specialized study, but they cannot keep up with the publications in their own field, and are forced to take on trust findings which they should properly test by personal experiment.

Big science means big bucks, which inevitably means greed, which eventually leads to dishonesty: skewed applications, fudged results. Which means it's no longer science. As Isaac Asimov once said: "Science is a set of rules to keep us from telling lies to each other. All scientists really have is a reputation for telling the truth." Bigness is costing them that reputation.

Great discoveries are born in one exceptional human being's superior mind. Darwin's matchless perceptions and ability to make connections operated magnificently without megabucks. As Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote of Darwin's visit to the Galapogos Islands: "Only five weeks, but five weeks of Darwin's eyes and Darwin's powers of observation and reasoning were equivalent to a whole previous cycle of human thought."

While big-science physicists with dollar signs in their eyes compete for loot, small-science projects of immediate importance starve. A project to study the curative powers of plants, threatened with extinction in the earth's dwindling rain forests, is funded by a paltry $2 million. Grants for hands-on anthropological field work among disappearing tribes--our best source for clues as to what we were, who we are, how we got that way, and where (if anywhere) we're heading--are scarcer and smaller.

Big science is no more likely to improve on Empedocles and Galileo, Newton and Darwin and Einstein than big religion is to improve on Buddha and Zoroaster, Moses and Jesus; or big publishing to improve on Shakespeare; or big music (if there were such a thing) to improve on Mozart.

"The proper study of mankind is man," said the poet--without a computer or even a typewriter, much less a prodigious grant.