What’s the cheapest scientific instrument that can get an average amateur to the bleeding edge of discovery work? So not just scutwork that the pros with billion dollars instruments like CERN or Hubble indulgently farm out.
There’s always been grinder tasks like variable star period tracking that has been available to masses of amateurs with low-end tools, lots of time, and a sort of eager sincerity. But I think increasingly, stuff with nontrivial likelihood of big impact is accessible….
…but almost all of it is computing opportunities with publicly released datasets. Primary experimental work with instruments is still I think always the preserve of the most expensive equipment.
This is an uncomfortable topic because amateurs have historically had an awestruck, deferential relationship with pros. And pros have historically conducted themselves with a sort of intellectual noblesse oblige grace towards them. But I think the relationship is too respectful.
I suspect many apparent structural-organizational problems with institutional science would just melt away if we had a way to sort off break up the natural monopolies around high capex bleeding-edge instrumental resources.
Fun fact: the Mt. Wilson 100 inch is the largest telescope amateurs can rent. About $2500 a night. It was the world’s largest telescope until 1949. Gonna go check it out tomorrow, and considering shelling out ~$250 for a group thing they’re offering
So amateurs are basically 72 years behind. It’s still a serious research grade scope. After all Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding with it. Still it’s middling now and you’d need luck plus serious talent to do breakthrough stuff with it.
I don’t want to suggest that the costliest toys are necessary for big breakthroughs. But there is a strong correlation. You do get cases where patience and imagination + ordinary toys = breakthrough. But while these are great stories they’re not the norm.
Side thought. The older I get, the more I appreciate experimental breakthroughs over theory. Theoretical genius breakthroughs are admirable, but science IMO is seeing sone thing nobody has seen before. Everything else is paperwork.
Smartphone. @inaturalist app gives you naturalist superpowers to find new species: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/things-posted-to-inaturalist-that-were-the-first-ever-observation-of-that-organism/11401/20…
That was the biggest lesson for me with OpenROV etc. The pros are leaving massive holes for sufficiently curious amateurs to fill.
There’s a bunch of responses along the lines of: pencil, paper, your brain, etc., which (all due respect) are part of a patronizing false Horatio Alger narrative of citizen science. It’s “you too can be a real scientist with everyday kitchen things!”
If chutzpah and pencils were all it took, why don’t pro scientists turn up their noses at big, delicate, billion dollar instruments and go looking fit inspired results from duct tape and vinegar?
This narrative is frankly as bad as the Westinghouse/Intel/whatever-it-is-now science fair narrative where 16 year olds apparently do real science, and it’s just a coincidence that parents typically tend to have PhDs and big institutional access.
A pragmatic democratization of science will avoid the temptations of both the disingenuous prep-school and imagination-and-duct-tape narratives, and solve for empowering above-average smart but not good-will-hunting grade talent.
This is certainly a great thing to have, but the reason I’m asking about low-cost instruments is that owning the means of discovery outright, without reliance on having to “apply” to institutional gatekeepers (good or bad) is a crucial feature of open science cultures.
Anyone can apply for telescope time! Beyond that, so much data is publicly available. The cost is in training, what’s an interesting problem and how to ask good questions of the data. The cost of entry to robust data access is a computer.
I get that you can’t let any rando off the street just sign up for Hubble time and trawl the skies randomly like I sometimes do with my amateur 4.5” scope, but something important lies in the ability to just idly play with instruments without having to do proposals and stuff.
The economic forces and fundamental causes are different, but science becoming dependent on big, essentially monopolistic instruments causes the same pathology as big companies getting monopolistic. Hubble and LHR aren’t Google or Facebook, but share some features…
Something about the cheery slogan “democratization of X” where X= science, tech, art, whatever, bothers me. It elides the messiness and essential violence and subversion of how democratic processes actually emerge. Cf: Fukuyama “Political Order and Political Decay”
Historically modern democracy happened in 2 steps
1: a mix of bourgeois/noble idealists and cynics drove a top-down expansion of political agency out of both altruistic and selfish motives
2: the newly empowered people actually took over and kinda drive it out of elite control
There’s no good reason to think “democratic i action of science” will be some sort of benevolently governed peaceful expansion of agency guided by the wise scientific bourgeoisie. At some point, if it doesn’t break free and out of control, it isn’t real democratization.
Citizen science around Covid is a good example. There was actual tension. Mutual hostility and suspicion between institutional and citizen science. A suspicious crowd checking up on CDC math. Often incompetently, and cargo-culting “scientific method”. But truly independently.
This is probably a good thing in the long run. Institutional vs indie science should probably be a slightly tense relationship of slight mutual hostility and check-and-balance dynamics. Not worshipful reverence and indulgent accommodation/co-option.
This is a good point and clarifies something I think I was a bit confused about. I’m interested in empiricism, but not in a post-theoretical inductive mode where you’re collecting more examples to serve theories. I’m interested in primary-phenomenology discovery empiricism. https://twitter.com/BryceBesler/status/1408674216489013257…
Yeah, a key part of early scientific revolution was that the pioneers were often instrument designers/builders too. Perhaps instrument making rather than use is what separates phenomenological empiricism from inductive empiricism. https://twitter.com/BryceBesler/status/1408672853864554499…
Crudely, it’s the 0-1 vs 1-n distinction in science. Ontological rather than epistemic advances. Disruption of empiricist paradigms. Kuhnian revolutions in experimental cultures 🤔
This should be an interesting counterpoint view from a pro-astronomer, especially since astronomy and microscopy are the 2 prototypical fields I’ve had in mind in this thread.
This will be lengthy response, so before I get into it, and for your many intellectually curious followers: Whether in Pasadena or Lagos, anyone can play with a ton of *amazing* public (=open) data with huge discovery space. Most professional astronomers rely on these datasets.
Interesting view from Chris (who has incidentally done one of the most interesting bits of independent scholarship I know of, using public satellite data sets to directly confirm radiation forcing effects in CO2 absorption spectra).
Possibly little overlap between theorist and experimentalist skill sets.
Novel untested theories + experimentalist = ideas for new test apparatuses.
Theorist + unexplained experimental measurements = new theories to fit the data
This seemingly happened again and again for…
Agree equipment fetishism is an adjacent risk, but it’s I think mistaken to conflate the value of instruments with the value of data they produce. If I had a Hubble level budget I wouldn’t build an exact clone of Hubble for eg. There’s primary value at the instrumentation level.
I would rather get Hubble data that pay for top shelf personal telescopes any day. LHC Data > making your own linear accelerator. I think equipment fetishism creeps in often and muddied the waters of discovery by amateurs. Bleeding edge already publicly available...as data :)
Thanks for the detailed response. I’ve linked it into main thread for visibility. I agree this is a powerful mode of discovery as well as a powerful social model. I’m not disputing that, or that there’s always a social > individual/lone wolf dimension. But…
In summary, I’m wary of overindexing on public datasets. They’re great but not a substitute for an indie ability to generate data. Data is better than models, but still… it’s a sort of map, not the territory. The only way to access territory is the instruments themselves.
Also, I’m alive to the importance of social collaboration. I ‘d just like more ways to do that besides the institutionally orchestrated mode. It’s not just some sort of larp/romantic yearning to want (for eg) a version of the “gentleman science” republic-of-letters mode…
…I kid around that I’d like my own mansion with mad scientist lab, over participating in mainstream publish-or-perish mode. I have my issues with Wolfram, but kinda great that he pulled that off. I’d like lots more wolframs, to complement/compete with institutionalized science.