How to become a scientist

[Arete]

Particularly in organismal biology, I have known a number of amateur hobbyists (e.g. birdwatchers, reptile and fish keepers, horticulturists, etc) who have become deeply involved in their hobbies and subsequently become involved in the scientific community, publish their observations in peer reviewed journals and present them at conferences. A handful of these "gentlemen naturists", after decades of involvement have become well regarded as leading authorities in their chosen fields of expertise.

However, I've never heard of an amateur naturist who has been significantly compensated financially for their work. In order to list "scientist" as your job title, you generally need an advanced degree to qualify for those positions.

 

So in short, you can do science without formal qualifications, but except for a handful of very rare exceptional cases, it's tough to be a scientist without them.

[ajb]

Particularly in organismal biology, I have known a number of amateur hobbyists (e.g. birdwatchers, reptile and fish keepers, horticulturists, etc) who have become deeply involved in their hobbies and subsequently become involved in the scientific community, publish their observations in peer reviewed journals and present them at conferences. A handful of these "gentlemen naturists", after decades of involvement have become well regarded as leading authorities in their chosen fields of expertise.

This is the sort of thing I would expect amateurs to still contribute to.

 

Astronomy is similar and amateurs do discover things and collect data as part of larger projects.

 

 

So in short, you can do science without formal qualifications, but except for a handful of very rare exceptional cases, it's tough to be a scientist without them.

Which is basically the position I take. Not impossible, but difficult and we have few great examples.

[Sato]

Just the amount of background knowledge has increased, say as compared to say two hundred years ago. Further and further specialisation has made it more difficult for people to read science and mathematics papers, this includes experts in one field reading something in another very close field. Working from just high school mathematics and science is not enough in general.

 

So people have to read a lot more and so on. This should be easier via the internet as you have said.

 

As I said in my first post, an argument against examples from centuries ago is reasonable. But that's not what we're discussing; the examples of successful scientists (mathematicians) I gave made contributions in the last 50 years, not 200. And of course we are not talking of people with only high school maths/science; everyone referenced took the time to learn very deeply into each field.

 

I also elaborated, positing that work, such as Grothendieck's even 60 years ago, was as complicated as the work of a given researcher today. This is not an assumption or based purely on intuition; I've seen modern, rigorous research published by tenured professors that's conceptually "simpler" than the content of some higher level expository texts.

 

In sum, everyone I've noted had to study material approximately as specialized as they would today, where we define "approximately" to mean that any added difficulty is mainly mitigated by the technological advances we discussed, as well as by the significant decrease in poverty and increase in household prosperity since (w.r.t. the countries of our examples). This I'd say would incline the "net difficulty derivative" to a negative.

 

Nowhere have I said it is impossible to make contributions. Just today is is less likely and I think it will get harder.

 

I know, you've made this clear. The qualification was being impossible "...unless they have some 'extraordinary' gene", as you were asserting by discounting certain examples as extraordinary and not to be taken as evidence. This I can accept for Ramanujan, though I'm not so sure how true the lore is, but you repeated it for Hua, and under a lenient eye you may have continued to do so for every such individual.

 

I think in my response to the previous snippet it is actually more likely and has become easier. I reiterated and added some points, addressing your concern with the increasing specialization. (Where) Do you see the net difficulty increasing, given those points?

 

Note that we consider "increasing" up to some reasonable future time. Just as a million tonnes might be added to the literature in the next hundred or so years, positively requiring more formal training, new learning technologies and growing economies, whether Salman Khanian, Star Trekkian or pharmaceutical, may be brought out that mitigates this. Else we may have 30 year PhD's, and those contingencies aren't in the domain of this discussion.

 

So, excluding maybe some very famous examples, I suspect it will be difficult to point to many amateurs today that are making real contributions. Not none of course.

 

The examples I know of are not very famous examples, and you'd be hard pressed to find their names in this context of "amateur" scientists. Namely because each of them kept a stay in the community, administrated scientific programmes, received funding, and weren't so sensationally idiosyncratic as Ramanujan was. This SFN thread might contain the biggest listing of "amateurs", who've made modern contributions of that magnitude, on the internet.

 

The individuals I personally knew, though I do not know if you'd count them as scientists or engineers, are similarly not on this radar. Still, they've received public and private funding, held visiting positions at top US institutions (according to a recent search of him, the policy of the universities is that you ought to have a PhD plus some experience to be a visiting scientist... or equivalent experience), and one (the applied physicist) has his developments being contracted by hospitals. I know of more amateurs, at least in physics/maths, who made such contributions and did receive funding, than I do those who did not. This is an offshoot of Arete's response and your agreement with him.

 

Surely not many, surely not many who advertise their circumstance, but surely a paucity of people of some quality doesn't mean that quality should be discouraged. Of course, how likely is it that someone will be more inclined to independent study than university, and will do so enough to make contributions? Unlikely, but if they are and they do, they should have a place.

 

So your friend has published original work?

 

The physics student is not a friend of mine. I met him at a public lecture (not the kind of public lecture you might be thinking of) and he discussed his efforts a bit. I have his phone number and may ask for lunch so will bring it up if I do. Even if he has published original work, I think he would fall into this category of people with no formal training in their fields that we are discussing.

 

I thought we were discussing people who are or wish to produce original work?

 

This maybe the route of our seeming disagreement.

 

I'm not sure where I contradicted our point of "people who are or wish to produce original work". This what I think we are discussing.

 

I do see one latent point of disagreement, maybe delineating it will help. I do not think that working with the guidance of a professor removes our label—an interesting edge case is if the professor is himself an amateur. Secondary school students not so unoften publish work in collaboration with researchers; this is more common in specialized schools in the US I think, but I would still call them amateurs. In fact, I think each of our examples, in addition to the independent study and research, regularly communicated with professors and received advisement. What makes them such is that they didn't go through any formal training.

 

Otherwise, wouldn't it then be necessary to acknowledge anyone without any formal training, as long as they had some consistent communication with an academician about their research, as a professional themselves? And if we do this, I think we lose our notion of amateur, and gain one that is incongruous with reality. No matter how many hours spent speaking with a professor, it will still be more and just as difficult for one without the credential (say, the PhD) to be acknowledged by the community as a professional.

 

So, provided your friend convinced a potential supervisor and the graduate admissions board that they could complete a PhD in reasonable time then they maybe admitted. The best way to convince them is with formal qualifications.

 

I've seen a professor speak of doing this as "decreasing the market value of a degree, which my career relies on". Perhaps you or the Polish school may be okay with this, but I think there is harsh sentiment most elsewhere. For the sake of making this thread a repository of "examples of idiosyncracy", as I've stumbled on a handful, I ought to mention Demetrios Christodoulou (who went to university with a past "advisor" of mine, from whom I learned that apparently Wheeler ran a program just to bring Greek secondary school students to the physics dept in this way), John Moffat (by way of Einstein and Bohr), Stephen Wolfram (in particle physics, before his well known excursions), Paul Lockhart, John Sterling, Ovidiu Savin, Jamshid Derakhshan, Aleksandr Khazanov (our required "early and tragic end"), and Jake Barnet (who was an old friend of mine, now on with his PhD; I spoke to him a few months ago, and he said that they actually agreed to and did award him a BSc, which may be a source of scarcity).

 

They guy with the credentials, all other things being equal, would be seen as the safer bet. This applies across all aspects of human interactions and not science in any particularly special way.

 

I did not say all other things being equal, I said it would not even be looked into if all other things were equal. That is, without consideration of independent research, a publication, or even extra study, the person would be looked over. I think this is unjust and assert that it is generally wrong. Fortunately there are some motivating examples in this, as enumerated above, but there is a pattern that those who took them on were stars in their respective fields, not representative of the majority's views and positions. Perhaps it is because they have more pull, but in any case, their potential to achieve runs with the luck of who they meet.

 

No papers I have read have been produced by people genuinely outside of academia.

...

Still, I do not think many amateurs have great impact across science today.

 

That may be true, and it is precisely because there aren't many of them, and I discussed this above in response to snippet #3. Our examples, the individuals we've found to satisfy this quality (I am a bit disinclined to the word "amateur"), have consistently made significant contributions in their respective fields which still echo today.

 

The two acquaintances I referenced won research grants, beating out the applications/proposals of even university labs I'd imagine, so there is certainly some impact being made right now. Of course this point is moot if you do not count engineers as scientists in this context, but this is the same work that many "applied" scientists are doing today.

 

Addendum:

 

I've read on forums complaints from engineers who work with technicians who'd, after years of work for the company, been promoted to their ranks. They rightfully complain, because apparently those "engineers" aren't able to do the necessary mathematical modelling and computations, and don't have the necessarily precise knowledge that they do. We are not discussing these types, we are discussing the "academic amateur" types who do study all of that.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Sato

[ajb]

Still the empirical evidence is that few 'amateurs' really make meaningful contributions. Journals are not full of articles written by people without some formal training, usually a PhD.

 

I am loosing track of the arguments here. I do not think we are in real disagreement here.

 

You have produced some examples of 'amateurs' and agree that there are few of them, but of course not none. Some of the great names in this category were clearly special people, and for sure there are plenty that just worked really hard (like most of us).

 

The interesting thing is, as you have pointed out, information if flowing much easier today than ever before. In that respect it should be easier for 'hobby scientists' to read up, gain a good level of knowledge and thus be ready to really contribute. However, this is not really what we see. There are exceptions to this and area of science more accessible than others.

 

In direct relation to the opening question, the most common and direct route to be a professional scientist is the standard one through the universities.

[Sato]

Our thread is getting complicated, i.e. I had to start referring to "snippet #n", and there are several points that are...beside the point. But there is one point you've concluded, that is in direct contradiction to my arguments, and I think should be resolved:

 

The interesting thing is, as you have pointed out, information if flowing much easier today than ever before. In that respect it should be easier for 'hobby scientists' to read up, gain a good level of knowledge and thus be ready to really contribute. However, this is not really what we see.

 

...

 

In that respect it should be easier for 'hobby scientists' to read up, gain a good level of knowledge and thus be ready to really contribute.

 

 

I addressed this in my previous response, maybe you did not see it when writing:

Surely not many, surely not many who advertise their circumstance, but surely a paucity of people of some quality doesn't mean that quality should be discouraged. Of course, how likely is it that someone will be more inclined to independent study than university, and will do so enough to make contributions? Unlikely, but if they are and they do, they should have a place.

 

The many technologies that we've found make the learning process, and consequently independent study, easier had only come into being a bit more than a decade ago, and have only become as widespread much more recently. We were only able to dig out a few examples people with no formal training from the last century, none of which I'm sure clipped a "no formal education" badge to their applications and publications. It is now only 15 years into this century, and sooner since the arrival into ubiquity of said technologies. And I've already marked here two examples of "amateur professionals" in their becoming, now in their early 20's who've actually credited specific resources of the internet for much of their circumstance. I'm not sure that I have happened to know every millennial of this sort, and don't think it's so unlikely there are others out there.

 

I don't expect any more than an extreme minority to fill the journals, but this is because most people who go into science were inclined to it in schooling, and fit sufficiently its pace and methods. Not because nearly everyone of this sort who puts in the sufficient effort fails to be able to make contributions, but because for most people, they fit scholastic bill. And if they don't, it's largely because they're either apathetic to science or aren't able to put in the necessary time and effort to get to that level. But then there is a small minority we have found, epitomized by the likes of Luogeng and Chaitin, who are both interested and able. The reason that the proportion you see is minuscule, is that their proportion to the population of humanity is minuscule. Often a matter of circumstance, not genetics, people who may, may, do better this way should not be discouraged from trying to do so, and this quality should not be so disparaged.

[Arete]

I know of more amateurs, at least in physics/maths, who made such contributions and did receive funding, than I do those who did not. This is an offshoot of Arete's response and your agreement with him.

 

This seems implausible, as major granting agencies (e.g. NSF, NIH, ARC, DOD, USDA, etc) require the principal investigator on any grant application to hold a permanent position at an accredited institution - this is for the purposes of overhead, support facilities and grant accountability. Generally, to get such a position, one requires an advanced degree, and thus to get major public funding, one would usually require an advanced degree.

 

Private industry funding is of course, discretionary, and technically can be given to anyone - an example would be the Rolex enterprise awards which are generally given to individuals who cannot get funding from the major granting agencies. I would still suspect that the vast majority of industry research money goes to individuals with formal qualifications.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Arete