Your comment about chapter 8 seeming “tacked on” resonated with me. Overall I was unconvinced by the argument in this book, because Werrett attempted to address this subject in almost complete isolation from the revolution in consumer product development and orders-of-magnitude reduction in cost of goods (along the entire spectrum from consumer to professional) enabled by the Industrial Revolution. This revolution made it possible for science to become sophisticated enough that it needed to happen in a more specialized environment. I don’t really buy his implication that science was moved out of the home as a quasi-conspiracy to exclude women from scientific practice — more likely, the overall society viewed a woman’s place as inside the home, which was a flaw in the social norm rather than the scientific project per se. Likewise in chapter 8, I felt he didn’t adequately address the bifurcation between pure and applied science. Pure science required ever-more-specialized equipment to explore ever-higher densities of matter and energy, whereas applied work could often continue on tabletops. This is true in Werrett’s “makerspaces” today — I work in a telecommunications applied research laboratory, and there is tons of improvisation and repurposing of gear all the time, but nobody is under any illusions that, as Werrett puts it, “the thrifty science of hack and makerspaces or complementary science could generate the same kind of revolutionary discoveries in the future.” I found this contention incredibly naive and it really deflated my overall impression of the book. Given that this book was published in 2019, I wonder what Werrett would have to say about “work from home” and the growing segment of serious scientific work that can happen in computer simulations. While modern computationally-equipped scientists can indeed work from home, their “observatories” are giant clusters on a Big Science scale. As the economy makes ever-more-complex tools accessible at consumer prices, so does the frontier of science expand to ever-greater resource intensity. That’s just physics…