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What images does science conjure up in your mind?<\/p>\n
You may well be visualising a laboratory, equations scrawled on a blackboard. Figures are surrounded by glassware filled with coloured liquids. Maybe someone, with a slightly furrowed brow, is hunched over a microscope.<\/p>\n
But what this scene fails to convey is that science isn\u2019t about labs, equipment or highly trained professionals. It\u2019s not even the body of knowledge locked away in great minds or archived within text books and journals.<\/p>\n
Instead, it\u2019s about having a curious, creative, critical and evidence-based mindset. Which means anyone who uses the scientific method can and should consider themselves a scientist. Indeed, many a discovery has been made by amateur scientists.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re still helping to shape science. In January 2023, a new study\u00a0confirmed the theory<\/a>\u00a0of amateur archaeologist Ben Bacon who concluded 20,000-year-old cave markings were a lunar calendar. He spent hours decoding the primitive writing system, which may pre-date equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years, before he approached a team of academics.<\/p>\n Astronomy has a long history of encouraging input from nonprofessional scientists. Brother and sister team\u00a0William and Caroline Herschel<\/a>\u00a0are among the most well known. Originally from Hanover, German, and trained as musicians, the siblings moved to England and eventually lived in Bath. During the 1770s William worked as a choirmaster while his sister kept his house.<\/p>\n After a day\u2019s work William would spend late nights voraciously reading up on astronomy. Breakfast conversations with his sister soon infected her with his passion. Together, the Herschels taught themselves to make their own telescopes.<\/p>\n Before long their prowess as telescope makers eclipsed their musical reputations. Eventually, the\u00a0astronomer royal<\/a>, who advised the king on astronomical matters, deemed their telescopes superior to those at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.<\/p>\n The siblings went on to make major discoveries, using their telescopes. In 1781, William was the first to spot Uranus, followed by several galaxies. Meanwhile, Caroline found eight comets, a dwarf galaxy and 14 nebulae (giant clouds of dust and gas in space<\/a>).<\/p>\n In the intervening 250 years, others followed the trail blazed by the Herschels. With no formal education\u00a0Clyde Tombaugh<\/a>\u00a0taught himself to make telescopes. His creations landed him a job at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he discovered Pluto in 1929.\u00a0Thomas Bopp<\/a>\u00a0noticed a smudge when he peered down a friend\u2019s scope, which was later named\u00a0Comet Hale-Bopp<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the very same night, (July 22 1995) unemployed physicist\u00a0Alan Hale<\/a>\u00a0spotted the comet, so he shared the glory. Since then the number of discoveries, largely of planets outside of our solar system\u00a0(exoplanets), by backyard astronomers<\/a>\u00a0have rocketed due to\u00a0citizen science projects<\/a>\u00a0and the thousands of data sets made\u00a0publicly available by space agencies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Back down on the ground there is still plenty for the amateur to explore.\u00a0Mary Anning<\/a>\u00a0is one of the most notable amateur Earth scientists.<\/p>\n In the early 19th century, she unearthed fabulous fossils on the beaches of Lyme Regis, Dorset. Despite her limited education, she devoured as much of the scientific literature as she could get her hands on and produced detailed technical drawings to record her finds.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the influential Geological Society of London did not allow female members. So Anning was forced to sell her finds to \u201cgentlemen\u201d geologists who passed her work off as their own.<\/p>\n Finding traces of a long dead creature gives people a taste of the thrill that any scientist feels when their data reveals something new. Since Anning trod the beaches of the Jurassic coast many an amateur palaeontologist has followed in her path.<\/p>\n A wonderful example is\u00a0fossil hunters Marie Woods and Rob Taylor<\/a>\u00a0who spotted a metre-long dinosaur footprint \u2013 the largest ever discovered \u2013 in 2021 on the Yorkshire coast.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the ground under our feet that has proved fruitful for budding Earth scientists. Our atmosphere is also a fertile area of research. Today, cheap air sensors, microprocessors and mobile phone networks allow anyone to use atmospheric\u00a0monitors<\/a>\u00a0that feed into public access databanks, which are used for climate and pollution models.<\/p>\n But the first and most influential amateur climatologist was probably\u00a0Guy Callendar<\/a>, a steam engineer by profession.<\/p>\n From the 1930s and throughout the mid 20th century, he published papers describing models of how carbon dioxide was affecting and would affect our climate. At the time his work was met with major scepticism, largely because he didn\u2019t have scientific qualifications and because CO\u2082 constitutes a fraction of our atmosphere: just 0.04%, up from 0.03% in the pre-industrial era.<\/p>\n So the climatologists of the time struggled to grasp how these tiny changes could drive the dramatic effects Callendar predicted. Nevertheless, his perseverance and robust analysis of the data eventually persuaded others to take the threat of CO\u2082 seriously.<\/p>\n Amateur scientists thrive where data, observations and objects can be collected without technical and expensive equipment. That\u2019s partly why historically there were so many amateur palaeontologists and astronomers.<\/p>\n Today, there is no shortage of open-source data and cheap analytical equipment. The result is hundreds of projects that interested\u00a0citizen scientists<\/a>\u00a0can get involved with, from\u00a0surveying penguins in the Antarctic<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0cloud spotting on Mars<\/a>.Out of this world<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Down to Earth<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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