big science

noun

often capitalized B&S

: large-scale scientific research consisting of projects funded usually by a national government or group of governments

Examples of big science in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Disney and 20th Century Studios are having a big science fiction moment with series like Planet of the Apes, Alien, and Predator, but of course, James Cameron's third Avatar movie is going to be the headline act for 2025. —Fran Ruiz, Space.com, 29 July 2025

Spaceballs delighted comedy audiences upon its release in 1987 as a send-up of the big science fiction franchises. —Jordan Hoffman, EW.com, 14 June 2025

Some will visit the moon, others will depart for deep space, but all of these tiny spacecraft will have one thing in common: small antennas capable of supporting big science. —IEEE Spectrum, 25 Jan. 2018

Moore’s new law is that big data will lead to big science. —IEEE Spectrum, 9 Jan. 2014

There could be some big science rewards waiting at the top. —Amanda Kooser, Forbes, 16 Aug. 2024

Most of the other faces from the Enterprise bridge have made surprisingly few game appearances, but a couple of big science fiction games showed an interest in the cast from this series. —Anna Washenko, Ars Technica, 4 Dec. 2023

The expeditions also represented the world’s first big science project---forefather to today’s Large Hadron Collider and Human Genome Project, in which an international community of hundreds or thousands collaborates on a single fundamental scientific problem at the frontier of human knowledge. —Guest Blogger, Discover Magazine, 4 June 2012

That’s a big if in an era when pushing through big science projects is politicized and fraught. —David Ewing Duncan, Scientific American, 7 Dec. 2022

Word History

First Known Use

1914, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for big science

• appliance
• compliance
• defiance
• reliance
• geoscience
• neuroscience
• noncompliance
• pseudoscience