Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Defense, Office of Naval Research, and National Science Foundation— and
NIAR in that sense would itself be a government institution.
On the other hand, atmospheric scientists feared the hierarchy, secrecy,
disciplinary compartmentalization, and strict oversight that might accom-
pany government support. In particular, they worried that the military
would come to dominate atmospheric research.
57
By channeling federal
resources into an institution expressly created to serve the interests of
universities, atmospheric scientists could insulate themselves from the
direct oversight of their government sponsors. In February of 1958, the
Committee on Meteorology began working closely with the University
Corporation for Atmospheric Research— leaders from the nation's uni-
versity meteorology departments— to establish the structure and goals of
NIAR.
58
In early 1959, UCAR officially became the parent organization
of the new institution, by then renamed NCAR. The UCAR board of
trustees submitted a detailed proposal to the NSF that outlined NCAR's
purpose, institutional structure, and initial research plans— a proposal
published as NCAR's founding document, the “Blue Book.” The Blue
Book also contained the original sketches of what later became the physi-
cal geography of I. M. Pei's Mesa Lab.
The Blue Book described a unique variation on the “big science” that
characterized government-sponsored research in other fields— especially
high-energy and particle physics— during the Cold War.
59
Coined in 1961 by
Alvin Weinberg of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the term
big science
typically describes expensive, large-scale, government-sponsored research
carried out either by private corporations or large scientific institutions.
UCAR certainly wanted NCAR to operate at a large scale; in fact, the global
nature of the subject matter all but demanded thinking big, and the Blue
Book explicitly stated that NCAR should provide “facilities and technologi-
cal assistance beyond those that can properly be made available at individual
universities.”
60
As Bruce Hevly notes in “Reflections on Big Science and
Big History,” however, big science in the twentieth century was typically
organized hierarchically, with vertically integrated teams striving for insti-
tutionally directed scientific objectives.
61
This was not the case at NCAR.
If a typical big-science project— the Berkeley cyclotron, for example— oper-
ated like a corporation, where a CEO or board of directors dictated research
priorities with specific goals in mind and then hired scientists to do the job,
NCAR operated more like a cooperative, where visiting scientists from
