Big Science in the 21st Century

Big Science facilities, also called large-scale research infrastructures (LSRIs), have delivered incredible progress in our fundamental understanding of Nature over the past 75 years. Given the required amount of public investment in Big Science, it is critical to understand these economic spill-overs and to develop tools for quantifying the wider socioeconomic impacts of Big Science facilities. This volume discusses how we can become more systematic in extracting and maximising the value and impact of Big Science and rethink their wider societal benefit. Big Science reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries and beyond borders to deliver global visibility, recognition and impact for scientific researchers - and not just with fellow scientists, but through wider engagement of mainstream media, industry, policy-makers and the general public. A "go-to" reference source that evaluates Big Science along its many coordinates - scientific, economic, societal, educational and cultural - is long overdue.

The essays in this book sketch out a framework on the nature and extent of the societal impacts of Big Science and the mechanisms that generate such effects, as well as highlight the complex realities that can be used as guidelines to fund Big Science facilities, and how we can maximise their impact. As science itself has become a subject of study and debate beyond the scientific community, these collected essays aim to encourage a dialogue with relevant stakeholders (such as scientists, policymakers, research managers and industry) and to highlight the complex role that science plays in today's society.

Auteur

Panos Charitos holds a BSc and MSc in astrophysics from Imperial College London and an MSc in media and communications from the London School of Economics. He joined CERN in 2012 as a member of the ALICE Outreach Group and since 2013 he has also served as co-editor of the Experimental Physics Department newsletter. From 2015 to 2019, Panos led the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study communication network, coordinating outreach and dissemination activities for the FCC collaboration and the supporting Horizon 2020 EU-funded projects. Before that, Panos had worked for major daily newspapers and was the founder of ROPI Publications House - specialising in the intersection of science with other fields.

Theodore Arabatzis is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. From 2020 to 2022, he was President of the European Society for the History of Science. He has published on the history of modern physics and on historically informed philosophy of science. More detailed information about his work can be found at http://scholar.uoa.gr/tarabatz/home.

Harry Cliff is Science Museum Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He works on the CERN LHCb experiment, making measurements of rare decays of beauty hadrons. For seven years, he was also a curator at the Science Museum in London, where he curated two major exhibitions on the Large Hadron Collider (2013) and the science of the Sun (2018). He is an enthusiastic communicator of science and gives regular public talks, including at TED and the Royal Institution in London.

Günther Dissertori is a Full Professor at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics of ETH Zürich. He works at ETH and at CERN (Geneva), mainly on data analysis with the particle detector CMS at the LHC accelerator. His research group also specialises in the transfer of know-how on detector development for particle physics to other disciplines - e.g. positron emission tomography (PET) in medical imaging. Günther is a member of the Swiss, Austrian and American physical societies; he is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society. From 2019 to 2021, he has been the scientific delegate of Switzerland to the CERN Council, the main governing body of CERN. In February 2022 he took up the role of Rector of ETH Zurich.

Juliette Forneris holds a PhD in geology from Arizona State University, US. Between 2010 and 2019, she worked as Cluster Manager of BigScience.dk, helping Danish businesses to become suppliers to European Big Science organisations. She worked particularly closely with CERN and ESO in her role as Industrial Liaison Officer (ILO) for Denmark. From 2015 to 2018, Juliette was Chair of the CERN ILO Forum and was also a member of the international and local organising committee for the first Big Science Business Forum (held in Copenhagen in 2018). In August 2019, she took on the position of Director of the International Centre at DTI, managing a team of experts in R&D fundraising (primarily from EU Framework programmes).

Jason Li-Ying is professor in corporate entrepreneurship and innovation and the research director at the Centre for Technology Entrepreneurship, Technical University of Denmark. Jason has research interests in technology and innovation management, organisational learning, strategic management and technology transfer. His work has been published in more than 35 scientific journals such as Long Range Planning, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Asia-Pacific Journal of Management, Technovation, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, R&D Management, Journal of Knowledge Management, and Journal of Technology Transfer, among others. Jason chairs the work package regarding socioeconomic impact metrics for the BrightnESS2 project (a flagship initiative of the European Spallation Source funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 programme). Jason also serves as a board member at China-Denmark Innovation House and is on the advisory board for several technology-based firms in Denmark. Jason is associate editor for the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management.