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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.
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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.
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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…
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…Rutherford (experimentalist) whose concentric glass tubes filled with radon, brass box filled with nitrogen+radium, and gold foil apparatuses proved alpha particles = helium nuclei, atomic transmutation, and existence/density of the nucleus, respectively. Meanwhile…
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…Bohr was meeting with different research groups and producing theories that explained the regularities of the periodic table, Balmer series lines, and nuclear cross-sections to hot/cold neutron bombardment. But I’m not aware of any actual hands-on apparatus he devised or used.
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Probably unreasonable to postulate new theories AND make the confirming measurements. Rather, pursue either: 1. Confirmatory measurements of cutting-edge untested theories 2. Find measurement data lacking a cohesive explanation and try out some principled theories.
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1 = browse around for some novel but experimentally-unsupported theories that are of interest 2 = browse around for datasets lacking a fundamental first-principles explanation.
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I’m thinking Galileo to Newton era as reference point. By the time Rutherford, Bohr era happened I’d say science was already very institutionalized and boundaries hardened. I think the picture you paint holds after about 1850 or so. Late Victorian era and beyond.
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I think Dark Matter/Dark Energy are the frontiers of physics, potentially where revolutionary discoveries of Galileo/Newton magnitude exist.