One of my favorite themes is the important of amateurs to science in this age of billion-dollar supercolliders and Mars missions.
That asteroid that just missed us? Found by an amateur - a Spanish dentist.
Countless species of new animals? Found by amateurs. This article gives us a retired mathematician with seven new beetles to his credit. The article reports that 6 of 10 new species from Europe are discovered by amateurs.
Even the famous can get in on the act: Japan's late Emperor Hirohito, an avid amateur marine biologist, found a new crab.
As I wrote in my Rumors of Existence, one of the important "living fossils," a kind of small house-building invertebrates called graptolites, was discovered by a London opthamologist, Noel Dilly, who became so well known that professional scientists sent him collections of sea floor animals to study.
1 comment:
That is good to hear when critics of pseudo-science often seem to be lumping in amateurs with the pseudo-scientists. I once read one who insisted an idea was pseudo-scientific if it was not published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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