Amateur Scientists

  Some parts of this site are currently incomplete & will be updated asap
  Other parts will change continually so use “Refresh” in your browser !!
  There is extensive use of “Tooltips” text to support learning which do
not seem to render on a Smartphone

Learning Resources Available - All Work is Subject to DHRF's "GD"

¹ Important Note

By founding and driving DHRF, David Husband has become an “amateur scientist“

A good friend said to DH recently that:
   “most of the major advances in science, etc, come from ‘outsiders’ to the field in question” ²

I will be quoting from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s³ best-selling book on FLOW

Can we really conceive of a layperson becoming an amateur scientist?

“The Delights of Science”:
“After all, we have been told many times that in this century science has become a highly institutionalised activity, with the main action confined to the big leagues. It takes extravagantly equipped laboratories, huge budgets, and large teams of investigators to survive on the frontiers of biology, chemistry, or physics…“

“In fact, this highly capital-intensive scenario, based on the model of the assembly line, happens to be an inaccurate description of what leads to success in ‘professional’ science. It is not true, despite what the advocates of technocracy would like us to believe, that breakthroughs in science arise exclusively from teams in which each researcher is trained in a very narrow field, and where the most sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment is available to test out new ideas. Neither is it true that great discoveries are made only by centres with the highest levels of funding. These conditions may help in testing novel theories, but they are largely irrelevant to whether creative ideas will flourish…“    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 134)

⁴ "New discoveries come to people who so enjoy playing with ideas that eventually they stray beyond the limits of what is known, and [then] find themselves exploring an uncharted territory..."    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 134)

Talking about the “joys” of scientific research, Csikszentmihalyi says:
“The person who succeeds proves themselves an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives them on” ⁵    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 135)

“If “normal” scientists are motivated in their work by the challenging intellectual puzzles they confront in their work, “revolutionary” scientists - the ones who break away from existing theoretical paradigms to forge new ones - are even more driven by enjoyment“    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 135)

"Breakthroughs in science still depend primarily on the resources of a single mind"

(Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 136)

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

“Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the astrophysicist whose life has already acquired mythical dimensions. When he left India as a young man in 1933, on a slow boat from Calcutta to England, he wrote out a model of stellar evolution that with time became the basis of the theory of black holes. But his ideas were so strange that for a long time they were not accepted by the scientific community. He eventually was hired by the University of Chicago, where he continued his studies in relative obscurity”

“There is one anecdote told about him that best typifies his commitment to his work. In the 1950s Chandrasekhar was staying in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where the main astronomical observatory of the university is located, about eighty miles away from the main campus. That winter he was scheduled to teach one advanced seminar in astrophysics. Only two students signed up for it, and Chandrasekhar was expected to cancel the seminar, rather than go through the inconvenience of commuting. But he did not, and instead drove back to Chicago twice a week, along back-country roads, to teach the class”

“A few years later first one, then the other of those two former students won the Nobel prize for physics. Whenever this story used to be told, the narrator concluded with sympathetic regrets that it was a shame the professor himself never won the prize. That regret is no longer necessary, because in 1983 Chandrasekhar himself was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics”    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, pp. 135-6)

Nicolaus Copernicus

“Nicolaus Copernicus perfected his epochal description of planetary motions while he was a canon at the cathedral of Frauenburg, in Poland. Astronomical work certainly didn’t help his career in the Church, and for much of his life the main rewards he had were esthetic, derived from the simple beauty of his system compared to the more cumbersome Ptolemaic model”    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 136)

Galileo Galilei

“Galileo had been trained in medicine, and what drove him into increasingly dangerous experimentation was the delight he took in figuring out such things as the location of the centre of gravity of various solid objects”

Isaac Newton

“Isaac Newton formulated his major discoveries soon after he received his B.A. at Cambridge, in 1665, when the university was closed because of the plague. ⁶ Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation”

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier

“Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, held to be the founder of modern chemistry, was a public servant working for the Ferme Generale, the equivalent of the IRS [HMRC] in prerevolutionary France. He was also involved in agricultural reform and social planning, but his elegant and classic experiments are what he enjoyed doing most”
(Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 137)

Luigi Galvani

“Luigi Galvani, who did the basic research on how muscles and nerves conduct electricity, which in turn led to the invention of the electric battery, was a practicing physician until the end of his life”

Gregor Mendel

“Gregor Mendel was another clergyman, and his experiments that set the foundations of genetics were the results of a gardening hobby”

Albert Einstein

“Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office [in Bern]”    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 137)

Summary

“These and the many other great scientists one could easily mention were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not “professionals” in their field; recognised figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing“    (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 137)

References:

Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2008. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Collins Publ. USA. Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2013. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Kindle. Ebury Publishing.