Is Bigger Really Better?

Abstract

I must receive at least 25 e-mails every day assuring me that size matters greatly, and any opportunity to increase it, even of dubious medicinal nature, should be immediately embraced. Well, is this true for science in general and seismology in particular? There certainly seems to be an increasing tendency for Big Science initiatives to take center stage, manifested both in federal funding of consortia, interdisciplinary initiatives, and big equipment items and the pre-eminence of multi-author research projects in major scientific journals. As an active seismological researcher who tends to prefer small-grant, single-investigator research, I look on these trends with mild alarm. Yet, for the past three years I served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and as one of the six-member EarthScope Management Team, investing substantial time and energy into the largest consortium funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences and the largest NSF major research equipment (MRE) project in the earth sciences, respectively. Given my widely shared concern that such Big Science activities intrinsically come at the expense of Small Science research funding (my own bread and butter), how do we each decide what endeavors to support with our time? Such choices confront all researchers, and now that I am not on a plane every other week, I've been giving it some more thought myself. If IRIS is Big Science for solid earth activities, then EarthScope is even Bigger Science, with $200 million budgeted for facility construction funding alone from 2003 to 2008 and ongoing annual operational and maintenance costs exceeding $20 million per year. Clearly, not all Big Science activities are of the same nature. Some involve large financial investments in unusually expensive activities—activities beyond the scope of single-investigator grants—that have very focused goals …