The long-serving director of the Harvard College Observatory argues that astronomy has received more patronage than any other pure science and asks how that support could be best spent. He weighs single great institutions against divided efforts, the endowment of research, and international cooperation of the kind the Astronomische Gesellschaft organised from 1870 to chart the sky.
A short, clear statement of how big science was imagined at the start of the twentieth century. Download the free EPUB.