There is lots of scientific progress being done in home and it would be possible to do even more, if few obstacles were removed. As noted, one of the biggest problem in doing home science is the cost of access to research knowledge. Pubmed etc, requires great deal of money to get papers out, or some connection to university with subscription. What if all of scientific knowledge, papers, reports, raw data were publicly available for everyone. Like some kind of addition to wikipedia, "wikiscience". Novadays scientific publications often obtain some sort of copyright to published papers and it reduces the chance to get this information out freely... but when you think of it, if everything was "free", science would advance much more faster.
How could "normal people" help science? For example, medicine would progress much more faster if people with certain illness could use their own brain to help solve the mystery. Often when person is diagnosed (or even long before this), his interest for his disease is greatly increased, and even normal people can have huge knowledge of this certain disease. If there was an open forum where this kind of people could ask questions from "academia", where normal people with smart brains could contradict "concensus" with hard facts, read from hundreds of papers... what would happen? One scientist is just one mind, and 100 sick people with smart questions can open whole new possibilities in research for this one scientist. Multiple sclerosis, cancers... when it's your life on the line, you'd rather find a cure than do anything else?
There are communities in internet where people have more knowledge about certain research chemicals (DRUGS!?) than scientific community itself, because certain kind of research is hard to do inside money-hungry academic circles. Human guinea pigs you might think, but they do it because they want to. Huge deal of sick people would want to be guinea pig if there was any theoretical possibility of cure even if it wouldn't be 100% safe.
So what needs to be done is offer open scientific hub which would expand at exponential rates, where every scientific paper is released, where everyone can contribute, and where everyone is peer-reviewer. Some kind of addition to wikipedia maybe? Open up the science for collective conciousness, and new ideas will flow.
And what would be academia's part in all this? To do expensive lab research, use expensive machinery to find answers to questions which will arise from the collective...
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There is lots of scientific progress being done in home and it would be possible to do even more, if few obstacles were removed. As noted, one of the biggest problem in doing home science is the cost of access to research knowledge. Pubmed etc, requires great deal of money to get papers out, or some connection to university with subscription. What if all of scientific knowledge, papers, reports, raw data were publicly available for everyone. Like some kind of addition to wikipedia, "wikiscience". Novadays scientific publications often obtain some sort of copyright to published papers and it reduces the chance to get this information out freely... but when you think of it, if everything was "free", science would advance much more faster.
How could "normal people" help science? For example, medicine would progress much more faster if people with certain illness could use their own brain to help solve the mystery. Often when person is diagnosed (or even long before this), his interest for his disease is greatly increased, and even normal people can have huge knowledge of this certain disease. If there was an open forum where this kind of people could ask questions from "academia", where normal people with smart brains could contradict "concensus" with hard facts, read from hundreds of papers... what would happen? One scientist is just one mind, and 100 sick people with smart questions can open whole new possibilities in research for this one scientist. Multiple sclerosis, cancers... when it's your life on the line, you'd rather find a cure than do anything else?
There are communities in internet where people have more knowledge about certain research chemicals (DRUGS!?) than scientific community itself, because certain kind of research is hard to do inside money-hungry academic circles. Human guinea pigs you might think, but they do it because they want to. Huge deal of sick people would want to be guinea pig if there was any theoretical possibility of cure even if it wouldn't be 100% safe.
So what needs to be done is offer open scientific hub which would expand at exponential rates, where every scientific paper is released, where everyone can contribute, and where everyone is peer-reviewer. Some kind of addition to wikipedia maybe? Open up the science for collective conciousness, and new ideas will flow.
And what would be academia's part in all this? To do expensive lab research, use expensive machinery to find answers to questions which will arise from the collective...