Nuclear Science as Big Science in Southeast Asia: the Case of Malaysia

摘要

More than any of the other sciences, nuclear science occupies the dubious place of honour when it comes to exciting the imagination or rousing fears about an impending holocaust. Although it shares the spot with quantum physics and relativity as being the pioneering sciences of the twentieth century to have circulated, quite early on, outside of the Euro-Atlantic centres of knowledge, it is also an area that benefitted immensely from improved understanding of the nucleon because of concurrent developments in the area of quantum field theories, especially that pertaining to strong nuclear interactions.