Science Technology & Society

 

Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by DE Mendoza, D. H.
Right arrow Articles by Vara, A. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati  
What's this?
Science Technology & Society, Vol. 12, No. 1, 27-48 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/097172180601200103
© 2007 SAGE Publications

Articles

Winding Roads to Big Science: Experimental Physics in Argentina and Brazil

Diego Hurtado DE Mendoza

Ana María Vara

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Ana María Vara are at the Centro de Estudios de Historia de la Ciencia José Babini, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Martín de Irigoyen 3100, 1650 San Martín, Argentina.

As a historiographical category, ‘big science’ was elaborated from the point of view of advanced countries. However, some developing countries decided to invest a significant part of their rather modest science budgets in building many-million-dollar facilities. A comparative approach to the study of the first stages of the Argentine TANDAR heavy ion accelerator and the Brazilian National Laboratory Synchrotron Light (LNLS) projects may help understand specificities in patterns of organisation of big science in peripheral contexts. Oversimplification of the decision-making processes linked to authoritarian political contexts—which allowed to overcome the lack of consensus within the physics community as well as financial uncertainties—seem to have been a necessary condition for TANDAR and LNLS, which differentiated them from big science in developed countries. Additionally, the different ways in which the institutionalisation of the nuclear area took place in Argentina and Brazil seem to have been responsible for the different paths followed by experimental physics between the 1960s and 1980s: nuclear physics in Argentina and particle physics in Brazil.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?