Explainer: Top 10 ambitious big science experiments To improve
our view of a vast and complex universe, scientists are creating
increasingly ambitious new tools. The work is not easy. Truly
big science requires decades of expensive commitment from
multiple nations. But the instruments that result are nearly as
awe-inspiring as the new worlds they help us discover. How we
did it Like anything that’s large and involved, big science is
not easy to measure. For our rankings, we took into account four
objective factors: the construction costs above all, but also
the operating budget, the size of the staff and the physical
size of the project itself. Even these were hard to compare on
an apples-to-apples basis, though, so we also used a tiering
system. Then we added in three subjective factors, weighing them
more heavily to reflect their relative importance: the project’s
scientific utility, its utility to the average person (“what
will it do for me”) and the always essential “wow” factor. For a
complete explanatio