How to break new ground in the era of “big science”
Leslie Sage, a senior editor at Nature, and Joanne Baker, Nature‘s Books & Arts editor and a former observational cosmologist, write from the astronomy perspective about the risks of ’big science’ in Nature Physics (6, 233; 2010). From their article: Astronomy is in an era of unprecedented change. Once the preserve of a dedicated few who travelled to remote observatories to investigate the heavens, the discipline is now ‘big science’, carried out on an industrial scale by a workforce of postdocs. Just as bankers have been seduced by the sophistication of computer analyses, more and more astronomy papers are showing … Read more