Amateur Hackers of Astronomy

eaglemoon writes "I have often wondered if Hackers and the Hacker culture is unique to software or can it be extended to other domains? This article in the NY Review of Books examines how amateurs are performing as well as professionals in the field of astronomy. The clash between the Baconian view of science and the Cartesian perspective is very interesting to reflect on and should be compared with community based software development and the traditional cathedrals built by firms." And it's from Freeman Dyson, always worth reading.

Comments

hackers are everywhere

[bromba]

Of course hackers are not only in software developement! People who tune their cars are hackers, people who hack on electronic circuitry are hackers, people who roll on their own boats, gliders, bicycles and so on, are hackers too.

BORING!

[tunah]

Nice try, but you can't interest me in tedious stars, planets, and far-off galaxies just by comparison to exciting alternative development models of personal computer software!

Radio Amateurs have hacked for YEARS...

[ivi]

Unabashed Plug:

And... you have to admit... they had an earlier
world-wide digital data network (carrying eMail
& bulletins) than our present wireless LANs...

They continue to innovate (lookup APRS & its
popular incarnation UI_View), enjoy space-
communications, and -still- manage to keep
in-touch via voice (as well as eMail, et al.)

Like working on your car with your mates,
& sailing around the world with your team,
Ham Radio is one of the more humane hobbies
that's high-tech in orientation...

Just imagine: In-touch by voice, without pay-
ing a bandwidth hit, while surfing, hacking
or (together) trying to design up the next
killer app (or debug the previous one... ;-)

Check it out. ;-)

[Info available from:

- ARRL in USA,
- RSGB in UK, &/or
- WIA in Austraila]

Found this site...

[Yarn]

when I was looking into fitting a webcam to a microscope I own (proper CCD cameras being expensive and requiring an additional frame grabber):

http://www.astrabio.demon.co.uk/QCUIAG/

Re:The potential for Amateur Astronomy is HUGE

[Mazzaroth]

I don't want to blow any bubble here, but this involves optical interferometry - which require control devices capable of tracking and correcting mechanical systems at the optical wavelenght scale. Check here for more details (there are many other technical references, have a look on Google).

Amateurs will do radio interferometry way before optical. But hey! Amateurs now have access to CCDs... Maybe it is not THAT far off.

This is not a sig.

Re:hackers are everywhere; reality hacking

[texchanchan]

Oh, absolutely. You can hack anything if the phrase means to study a system or tool and develop its less-known capabilities. I guess even socialites are hackers of human interaction (for good or ill, depending on their personal qualities). I think of hacking as poking around in the substrate of whatever it is and learning what's there, finding shortcuts and odd combinations of features that produce amazing results. You use whatever tools you've got: telescopes for the moon, microscopes for microbes, general observation for reality. (Any hacker can surprise you when they say "Watch this" but those reality hackers can really surprise you.)

Re:One line in the review especially caught my eye

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I think it is naive to believe that politics and legality will have much effect on curbing the amateur genetic engineers. It is no more difficult than building your own computer, or building a decent telescope, and it gets easier every day, as used equipment from all the gene companies here in Silicon Valley is making its way into the local surplus market.

Well, not quite. You can build a very good computer for under $1,000, and I believe a very good telescope for about the same amount. Having recently been involved in setting up a cell bio lab on a shoestring (by the standards of the field) budget, I'd say you're not going to be doing any reliable work of the sort you're talking about without a $50,000 investment or so. Which isn't out of range of the enthusiastic amateur experimenter, certainly -- I know at least a few people who've spent that much on computer goodies -- but it takes a little more planning and forethought than a computer or a telescope does.

And, of course, there's the knowledge issue. Genetic engineering, or any other kind of serious molecular biology, is hard -- we're not going to be seeing Gene Splicing In A Nutshell on the shelves any time soon. As a Comp. Bio. student, one of the few in the program with a serious background in both CS and biology, I see the problems that the students (and, for that matter, the professors) who are strictly from the CS side have in understanding the biology. These are smart, hard-working people, but the fact is it takes years of experience to really "get" molecular biology in any useful fashion.

(Note that I'm not denigrating CS -- a bio PhD and a CS PhD are about equally well-educated, IMO. But at the amateur level, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started hacking code than hacking genes.)

In the long run, I think you're right. The knowledge and the equipment are out there, and will become steadily more available, and a generation or two down the line we will almost certainly see teenagers pounding out real viruses in their parents' basements (and won't that be fun) -- hopefully, those same teenagers, once they're grown up a bit, will be the ones who go on to make real and lasting contributions to biology and medicine, just like teenage hackers often grow up to be the best programmers and CS researchers. But right now we're at the "mainframe" stage of biology, where the genome -- like the computer a couple of generations ago -- is a rather arcane piece of machinery with high barriers to entry.