Large laboratories supported by generous grants churn out hundreds of technical articles.
The author list on a paper's title page can easily consume a dozen lines, and so many scientists may contribute to a given discovery that the Nobel Prize committee can find it impossible to determine which three names shall be cast in gold. Contemporary science has become so big, indeed, that it can strain the sizable resources of a big economy, a fact epitomized by the proposed superconducting supercollider. The free exchange of information may give way to possessive secrecy, for example, and intellectual honesty may even succumb to the quick fix of data fraud and tampering. But what I worry about most is whether all the commotion of big science obscures the voices of a few homeless people who are today's versions of the great geniuses of old. For over a dozen years I have been conducting extensive research on what it takes to make a phenomenal contribution to science.