I've been tracking the debate over electricity in space for more than 12 years now. You may want to rethink your belief that you can judge an entire cosmology based upon a couple of articles that you read online.
Re: "The fact that we'd have to throw out 100+ years of science AND WORKING TECHNOLOGY FROM THAT SCIENCE to entertain the electric universe bullshit means it is just that... bullshit."
Your claim that GPS somehow proves Einstein's Relativity was shown with explicit historical detail to be incorrect in Juan Calsiano's post. - which may be one of the best rebuttals to this claim ever posted onto the Internet. If you disagree with it, the proper response would be to help us to understand why it is wrong. Provide your analysis.
Yes, and notice that there are 250 comments (!) attached to the article - and anybody who actually reads through those comments will see an actual back-and-forth discussion happening. You're trying to convince people that there is no debate to be had here, but the link you've sent people to exhibits a debate attached to the article.
That's not me. And either way, the anon's point is nevertheless valid in the context of their statement because they are not explicitly referring to force-free field-aligned Birkeland currents. The Bessel function implies concentric cylinders of charges moving in opposite directions. A person need not be a mathematician to understand from that geometry that the magnetic fields of these concentric cylinders should more-or-less cancel each other out. All you really need to know to get this is the right-hand rule; you've got thumbs up going in opposite directions, thus the hands curl in opposite directions. All it takes is an approximately equal current in each direction. Why would that not be the case?
It's not a complicated situation once you get the geometry of it.
Stunning display of intellectual hostility: Somebody down-voted the comment - making it harder for others on slashdot to see it - but did not point out why the post is incorrect.
Debye screening has been shown to be untrue in countless instances. Astrophysicists enshrined the conjecture as a dogma, then subsequently ignored each violation. If you know of a serious attempt to somehow validate the conjecture, please kindly post it. Having some familiarity with these debates, I can clearly see that your confident declarations greatly exceed the actual evidence.
It's probably fair to say that the editor has not found the arguments presented on Slashdot against the Electric Universe to be very persuasive. Notice that even after some 70 comments, many of them disparaging the idea that laboratory plasma experiments can be used to inform inferences about cosmic plasmas, not a single commenter has posted a believable alternative interpretation which would explain these extraordinary filaments.
Re: "The part that annoys me most about the whole Electric Universe thing is that nowadays you basically can't talk about electromagetism in astrophysics at all."
Astrophysicists' problems with magnetic fields did not begin with the Electric Universe; they began with the former mistaken assumption that the space between stars is basically empty. That unfortunate assumption guided the creation of scientific theories in the space sciences up until the first instrumented rockets definitively demonstrated that space is not actually empty. To this day, the most popular theories in the space sciences remain rooted in a pre-Space Age set of assumptions. The situation was properly stated in a 1963 Popular Science interview with James van Allen:
Once rockets were finally sent into space - in 1958 - the mistake was immediately realized because those rockets returned to the ground radioactive. Once it was realized that the space between planets and stars is permeated by an ionized medium, the introductions of many graduate-level textbooks were updated with explicit mention of the importance of the plasma state:
"Today it is recognized that 99.999% of all observable matter in the universe is in the plasma state..."[4]
"It is estimated that as much as 99.9% of the universe is comprised of plasma."[5]
"..the plasma state is the most abundant state of matter. It is thought that more than 99.9% of matter in the universe is in plasma"[6]
"plasmas are abundant in the universe. More than 99% of all known matter is in the plasma state"[7]
"It is an interesting fact that most of the material in the visible universe, as much as 99% according to some estimates, is in the plasma state"[8]
"Probably more than 99 percent of visible matter in the universe exist in the plasma state."[9]
"It is estimated that more than 99 percent of matter in the universe exists as plasma; examples include stars, nebulae, and interstellar particles"[10]
"It is sometimes said that more than 99 percent of the material in the universe is in the form of plasma"[11]
"about 99% of matter in the universe is plasma"[12]
"99.9 percent of the Universe is made up of plasma," says Dr. Dennis Gallagher, a plasma physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center" [13]
"How was it determined that 99% of the Universe is in a plasma state? Most of the gas in interstellar space is ionized (astronomers can tell by the wavelengths of light the gas absorbs and emits), and all of the gas in stars in ionized, that's where the 99% comes from. The 99% ignores any dark matter which might be out there."[14]
"It has often been said that 99% of the matter in the universe is in the plasma state.[15]
"And yet these radio-frequency links must survive the complexities of the plasma which comprises well over 99.9 percent of the universe".[16]
"This fourth state of matter probably comprises more than 99.9 per cent of the matter in our Universe."[17]
Re: "The filaments (having no similarity whatsoever with discharges inside globe toy nor with lightning) though are real and were discovered in mid 80s."
Filamentation is a fundamental aspect of plasmas conducting charged particles, and has been observed countless times in all sorts of plasma laboratories. The novelty plasma globe has been pointed to simply because the public will be most familiar with it.
Filamentation was also the most important prediction by Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven insofar as it distinguishes a universe dominated by plasmas from one that is not. Filaments do not naturally follow from the radial force of gravity, so those who might assert that they are not currents would have to rely upon either a creation event, chance observation from "shocks", or some other esoteric phenomenon forcefully imposed upon the observation in order to avoid the simple inference of electric currents.
If you have an alternative scientific explanation for why these filaments are magnetized and how it is that they remain coherent over light years distances, then you should post it.
To be clear, there is no mathematical basis in the Bessel function for your claim that a massive field would be observable from outside of the filament structure.
If you take a close look at the geometry which is being alleged, you should notice that the existence of these counter-rotating cylinders means that we cannot assume that electric currents will produce large magnetic fields.
It wasn't more than about two years after Dr. Scott published this paper, by the way, that another paper was published, acknowledging the existence of counter-rotation in AGN [active galactic nuclei] jets:
our results have now yielded firm evidence that many — possibly all — AGN jets have inward currents along their axes and outward currents in a more extended region surrounding the jets. This provides fundamental information about the conditions leading to the formation and launching of the jets, as well as key input to theoretical simulations of astrophysical jets. It also indicates that astrophysical jets are fundamentally electromagnetic structures, which must be borne in mind when interpreting observed features in the distributions of both their intensity and linear polarization.
Here is a partial transcript of an audio interview of Jeff Schmidt, a former editor of Physics Today for 19 years. He received his PhD in physics from UC Irvine, and he is the author of a critique of the graduate programs, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look At Salaried Professionals And The Soul Battering System That Shapes Their Lives. In both the book and this interview, Jeff likened professional training - you know, the graduate programs - to a cult.
So, I looked into the techniques that totalitarian organizations use to get people to play a politically subordinate role, and I found that professional training programs use the same techniques.
These include, for example...
- recruitment through big promises
- social isolation
- milieu control [control over one's social environment]
- setting up teachers as unquestioned authority
- undermining true self confidence
- and gross exaggeration of the importance of the work to the world
And after seeing that similarity to cult indoctrination, I thought, well, how can this be resisted?
That's when I discovered this Army manual called Prisoner of War Resistance, in which the Army trained its people how to resist indoctrination if they are captured and made prisoners of war.
And I found that these techniques apply very well to graduate school and the workplace and any hierarchical, repressive situation. So, I wrote in my book that the United States Army issued a survival manual for graduate school...
[laughter]
... without knowing it, and... In fact, in a crucial way, the military manual is better than civilian advice books, which are written specifically for students. The civilian books help you conform to the demands of the institution. You get your credential, but you lose your identity in the process.
However, the Army manual shows you how to survive the training programs and keep control over your identity. The military even has a name for it; they call it
The phenomenon of long-range-attraction, short-range repulsion which occurs between conducting plasma filaments is known as the Biot-Savart Law. A comment attached to the original post pointed to a diagram in Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe which can be viewed online. There is an entire chapter there in Peratt's text which goes through the mathematics of Biot-Savart (Chapter 3: Biot Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma).
Honestly, at this point, I am trying too hard to help tech help itself. If the world of tech cannot understand or care about the meaning of these findings - whose importance are truthfully inherently self-evident - then let it crash and burn. Whatever replaces it will learn from tech's failure.
I've implemented your suggestions w a new submission, and there has been no difference at all in the moderation. This does not reflect well upon the tech community... apparently so busy making apps that there is not enough time to listen to a government researcher explain that the Earth was hit by a solar outburst which appears to have been much stronger than the Carrington event.
Re: "Really? Is that true? Tucson Arizona has a view of the south magnetic pole?"
Ah, so because I did not put the word "sky" after "south magnetic pole", you don't believe it?
Re: "Isn't there a single page that summarizes it all?"
The problem is that science journalists refuse to cover the matter, and since people don't know what a plasma is, they quickly stop trying to understand it. History will not look kindly upon the tech community's lack of leadership. This is yet another instance where there is a real need for forward-looking leaders thinking deeply about the hardening of all of our networks and power grids, and apparently it is just too much work to care.
I honestly have considerably more faith that Trump will sort out the North Korean situation than tech creating networks and power grids which are actually hardened against solar outbursts.
There are two, and both are timestamped. The first takes you directly to the most important quote:
"My first introduction to petroglyphs was by David Talbott. I went to a meeting of his by accident, and learned something about what they were doing. And then he showed me some pictures, and I looked at the pictures and I said 'Where did you get these pictures?', because I had never seen them outside of an unclassified environment, to tell you the truth. And they're on rocks...
'Where are these rocks stored? What vault?'
He's got these rocks... You know, I was kind of, you know, what am I gonna do now?
And he said, 'Oh no, they're all over, they're petroglyphs, they're all over the place.'
And I was stunned. Having worked in what's called high-energy density plasmas, high-energy density nuclear physics, I was stunned that these pictures - apparently thousands of years old - preceded what we had only been recording for about two years with our new facilities which cost a lot of money."
That's not my fault. That's because Slashdot is too old fashioned to display imagery on the site, and you apparently didn't go through all of the materials. There is a map of the sequence of plasma formations - the Peratt instability map - in one of the links, where the petroglyphs are correlated with reconstructions of the laboratory forms. The video shows the actual declassified laboratory imagery.
Realize that for each of these types of petroglyphs, they all have a view of the south magnetic pole.. That is discussed in the video as well.
See recent Slashdot submission titled Petroglyph Explanation Remains Ignored After 15 Years. This situation with Trump lacking a science advisor is not especially different in that the person making these petroglyph claims, Anthony Peratt, is a government scientist specializing in high-energy density plasmas and nuclear physics, and has even advised the US government on the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Slashdot community does not itself seem especially concerned about warnings from nuclear scientists, as the submission has had plenty of time by now to make it to the homepage.
Re: "The second thing "Citizen Scientists" usually fool themselves about is how slow scientific work almost universally is and how little you typically have to show for a lot of work. Hence they often try do do things faster and that universally fails. Because the thing is, if you have a little, incremental, but scientifically sound result, this result will basically stand forever."
It's interesting to watch you guys work yourselves towards the "no, not possible" answer. It seems to me that this conclusion is completely dictated by your mindset that there are no serious challenges to textbook theories which have to date already been proposed. With such a starting point, crowdsourcing would struggle insofar as it would fail to focus on those ideas which are most worthy of our attention. But, a review of critiques of modern science would reveal that actually critics are aware of numerous serious challenges which academics have refused to investigate, and it stands to reason that these are the areas where crowdsourcing can provide tremendous societal value -- by transforming informationally disordered topics into publishable topics through a process of identifying unexpected vindications and aggregating (and prioritizing) pre-existing coherent arguments.
It does not take a scientist to do that -- just somebody who is willing to take the time to read and then subsequently track the controversy over many years.
Hi, Loren. I am going through the responses to your thoughtful question, and am sort of imagining your reaction as unimpressed by the answers (please correct me if I am wrong).
The fact of the matter is that we live in a unique time insofar as we have more access to information and wisdom from crowds than ever before. You might imagine that this explosion of resources should have some disruptive effect upon the way that science is done today -- something that mirrors what Amazon did to e-commerce when it commercialized the long tail... the argument being that since specialist scientists are essentially laypeople outside of their specializations, it's conceivable that "the crowd" can outperform these specialist communities when it comes to problem-solving tasks which involve a great amount of synthesis and generalist knowledge (which is honestly not today highly valued in academia). If you've had any of these thoughts, then realize that you are not completely alone: In fact, Rob Spencer at Pfizer has I think very well documented that the crowd can indeed be mined for solutions to some of the most challenging technical challenges. Pfizer has been doing just that for some years already, and they claim that the approach works.
Before continuing, I want to differentiate the two fundamentally different types of "citizen science". It can be either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down citizen science is just laypeople doing the legwork for some pre-existing academic work (many of the answers refer to this sort of work). I would argue that the far more interesting vision for citizen science involves enlisting the support of crowds towards solving certain problems which the critics of modern science have argued academia is itself struggling to address, and I call this approach "bottom-up". For the rest of this post, I will specifically focus upon bottom-up citizen science.
I would argue that learning the most common and most poignant critiques of modern science must be the first step towards designing a citizen science crowdsourcing platform, for the simple reason that laypeople are never going to completely replace the specialist. What you really want to achieve with these sorts of projects is a synergistic effect from combining the wisdom of crowds with the power of specialist science. An approach which fixes one or more observable problems with modern science could produce such an effect. But, like I said, to be sure that you are in the right ballpark, you have to become an expert in critiques of modern science. This first step is actually the one which Slashdotters seem to have the most difficulty with, and it is likely the reason why the answers to your question are not so great (sorry guys, downvote me if you must, but I am being honest).
If this is seeming too vague to be actionable, it may be useful to dig into a specific example. One very serious problem with the modern science approach is the infamous "publish or perish" problem:
Dear EPFL,
I am writing to state that, after four years of hard but enjoyable PhD work at this school, I am planning to quit my thesis in January, just a few months shy of completion...
While I could give a multitude of reasons for leaving my studies – some more concrete, others more abstract – the essential motivation stems from my personal conclusion that I’ve lost faith in today’s academia as being something that brings a positive benefit to the world/societies we live in. Rather, I’m starting to think of it as a big money vacuum that takes in grants and spits out nebulous results, fueled by people whose main concerns are not to advance knowledge and to effect positive change, though they may talk of such things, but to build their CVs and to propel/maintain their car
Slashdot Mirror
I've been tracking the debate over electricity in space for more than 12 years now. You may want to rethink your belief that you can judge an entire cosmology based upon a couple of articles that you read online.
You're not quite understanding: the CMB is the emission.
Anthony L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34:
Juan Calsiano has replied to your claims about Relativity here.
Juan Calsiano has already rebutted your claim here.
If you have an explanation for the filaments that does not involve electric currents, please provide it.
Re: "The fact that we'd have to throw out 100+ years of science AND WORKING TECHNOLOGY FROM THAT SCIENCE to entertain the electric universe bullshit means it is just that... bullshit."
Your claim that GPS somehow proves Einstein's Relativity was shown with explicit historical detail to be incorrect in Juan Calsiano's post. - which may be one of the best rebuttals to this claim ever posted onto the Internet. If you disagree with it, the proper response would be to help us to understand why it is wrong. Provide your analysis.
Yes, and notice that there are 250 comments (!) attached to the article - and anybody who actually reads through those comments will see an actual back-and-forth discussion happening. You're trying to convince people that there is no debate to be had here, but the link you've sent people to exhibits a debate attached to the article.
That's not me. And either way, the anon's point is nevertheless valid in the context of their statement because they are not explicitly referring to force-free field-aligned Birkeland currents. The Bessel function implies concentric cylinders of charges moving in opposite directions. A person need not be a mathematician to understand from that geometry that the magnetic fields of these concentric cylinders should more-or-less cancel each other out. All you really need to know to get this is the right-hand rule; you've got thumbs up going in opposite directions, thus the hands curl in opposite directions. All it takes is an approximately equal current in each direction. Why would that not be the case?
It's not a complicated situation once you get the geometry of it.
Stunning display of intellectual hostility: Somebody down-voted the comment - making it harder for others on slashdot to see it - but did not point out why the post is incorrect.
Debye screening has been shown to be untrue in countless instances. Astrophysicists enshrined the conjecture as a dogma, then subsequently ignored each violation. If you know of a serious attempt to somehow validate the conjecture, please kindly post it. Having some familiarity with these debates, I can clearly see that your confident declarations greatly exceed the actual evidence.
It's probably fair to say that the editor has not found the arguments presented on Slashdot against the Electric Universe to be very persuasive. Notice that even after some 70 comments, many of them disparaging the idea that laboratory plasma experiments can be used to inform inferences about cosmic plasmas, not a single commenter has posted a believable alternative interpretation which would explain these extraordinary filaments.
Re: "The part that annoys me most about the whole Electric Universe thing is that nowadays you basically can't talk about electromagetism in astrophysics at all."
Astrophysicists' problems with magnetic fields did not begin with the Electric Universe; they began with the former mistaken assumption that the space between stars is basically empty. That unfortunate assumption guided the creation of scientific theories in the space sciences up until the first instrumented rockets definitively demonstrated that space is not actually empty. To this day, the most popular theories in the space sciences remain rooted in a pre-Space Age set of assumptions. The situation was properly stated in a 1963 Popular Science interview with James van Allen:
Once rockets were finally sent into space - in 1958 - the mistake was immediately realized because those rockets returned to the ground radioactive. Once it was realized that the space between planets and stars is permeated by an ionized medium, the introductions of many graduate-level textbooks were updated with explicit mention of the importance of the plasma state:
(sources are available at here.)
What is not widely recognized is that, based on observations of the ionosphere, a gas can start to behave as a plasma with less than 1% ionization.
To give an explicit example for how the empty vacuum of space mistake has shaped the direction
Re: "The filaments (having no similarity whatsoever with discharges inside globe toy nor with lightning) though are real and were discovered in mid 80s."
Filamentation is a fundamental aspect of plasmas conducting charged particles, and has been observed countless times in all sorts of plasma laboratories. The novelty plasma globe has been pointed to simply because the public will be most familiar with it.
Filamentation was also the most important prediction by Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven insofar as it distinguishes a universe dominated by plasmas from one that is not. Filaments do not naturally follow from the radial force of gravity, so those who might assert that they are not currents would have to rely upon either a creation event, chance observation from "shocks", or some other esoteric phenomenon forcefully imposed upon the observation in order to avoid the simple inference of electric currents.
If you have an alternative scientific explanation for why these filaments are magnetized and how it is that they remain coherent over light years distances, then you should post it.
Re: "But I've never heard of this 'Electric universe' theory. I did a quick google search and now I know why ..."
But, in your other comment attached to this same submission, you leave the opposite impression that you are already familiar with the Electric Universe:
So, which is it?
Re: And yet when we search for these massive fields, they've never been found
It's not clear why you expect to see "massive" fields. Don Scott has published the mathematics for the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current, and it is a Bessel function - a series of concentric cylinders of counter-rotating charge.
To be clear, there is no mathematical basis in the Bessel function for your claim that a massive field would be observable from outside of the filament structure.
If you take a close look at the geometry which is being alleged, you should notice that the existence of these counter-rotating cylinders means that we cannot assume that electric currents will produce large magnetic fields.
It wasn't more than about two years after Dr. Scott published this paper, by the way, that another paper was published, acknowledging the existence of counter-rotation in AGN [active galactic nuclei] jets:
Here is a partial transcript of an audio interview of Jeff Schmidt, a former editor of Physics Today for 19 years. He received his PhD in physics from UC Irvine, and he is the author of a critique of the graduate programs, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look At Salaried Professionals And The Soul Battering System That Shapes Their Lives. In both the book and this interview, Jeff likened professional training - you know, the graduate programs - to a cult.
The People's Power Hour, WIDR
Kalamazoo, MI, recorded 2005
The phenomenon of long-range-attraction, short-range repulsion which occurs between conducting plasma filaments is known as the Biot-Savart Law. A comment attached to the original post pointed to a diagram in Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe which can be viewed online. There is an entire chapter there in Peratt's text which goes through the mathematics of Biot-Savart (Chapter 3: Biot Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma).
Honestly, at this point, I am trying too hard to help tech help itself. If the world of tech cannot understand or care about the meaning of these findings - whose importance are truthfully inherently self-evident - then let it crash and burn. Whatever replaces it will learn from tech's failure.
I've implemented your suggestions w a new submission, and there has been no difference at all in the moderation. This does not reflect well upon the tech community ... apparently so busy making apps that there is not enough time to listen to a government researcher explain that the Earth was hit by a solar outburst which appears to have been much stronger than the Carrington event.
Re: "Really? Is that true? Tucson Arizona has a view of the south magnetic pole?"
Ah, so because I did not put the word "sky" after "south magnetic pole", you don't believe it?
Re: "Isn't there a single page that summarizes it all?"
The problem is that science journalists refuse to cover the matter, and since people don't know what a plasma is, they quickly stop trying to understand it. History will not look kindly upon the tech community's lack of leadership. This is yet another instance where there is a real need for forward-looking leaders thinking deeply about the hardening of all of our networks and power grids, and apparently it is just too much work to care.
I honestly have considerably more faith that Trump will sort out the North Korean situation than tech creating networks and power grids which are actually hardened against solar outbursts.
Re: "it has too many youtube videos"
There are two, and both are timestamped. The first takes you directly to the most important quote:
Re: "but I don't see the rock solid evidence"
That's not my fault. That's because Slashdot is too old fashioned to display imagery on the site, and you apparently didn't go through all of the materials. There is a map of the sequence of plasma formations - the Peratt instability map - in one of the links, where the petroglyphs are correlated with reconstructions of the laboratory forms. The video shows the actual declassified laboratory imagery.
Realize that for each of these types of petroglyphs, they all have a view of the south magnetic pole.. That is discussed in the video as well.
See recent Slashdot submission titled Petroglyph Explanation Remains Ignored After 15 Years. This situation with Trump lacking a science advisor is not especially different in that the person making these petroglyph claims, Anthony Peratt, is a government scientist specializing in high-energy density plasmas and nuclear physics, and has even advised the US government on the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Submission ...
The Slashdot community does not itself seem especially concerned about warnings from nuclear scientists, as the submission has had plenty of time by now to make it to the homepage.
Pfizer claims to already be using crowdsourcing to solve long-tail problems, so somewhere between your "absolutely not" and their "yes, we're already doing it" is the right answer.
Re: "The second thing "Citizen Scientists" usually fool themselves about is how slow scientific work almost universally is and how little you typically have to show for a lot of work. Hence they often try do do things faster and that universally fails. Because the thing is, if you have a little, incremental, but scientifically sound result, this result will basically stand forever."
It's interesting to watch you guys work yourselves towards the "no, not possible" answer. It seems to me that this conclusion is completely dictated by your mindset that there are no serious challenges to textbook theories which have to date already been proposed. With such a starting point, crowdsourcing would struggle insofar as it would fail to focus on those ideas which are most worthy of our attention. But, a review of critiques of modern science would reveal that actually critics are aware of numerous serious challenges which academics have refused to investigate, and it stands to reason that these are the areas where crowdsourcing can provide tremendous societal value -- by transforming informationally disordered topics into publishable topics through a process of identifying unexpected vindications and aggregating (and prioritizing) pre-existing coherent arguments.
It does not take a scientist to do that -- just somebody who is willing to take the time to read and then subsequently track the controversy over many years.
At least, that is the point I made in my own answer a bit further down in this same thread.
Hi, Loren. I am going through the responses to your thoughtful question, and am sort of imagining your reaction as unimpressed by the answers (please correct me if I am wrong).
The fact of the matter is that we live in a unique time insofar as we have more access to information and wisdom from crowds than ever before. You might imagine that this explosion of resources should have some disruptive effect upon the way that science is done today -- something that mirrors what Amazon did to e-commerce when it commercialized the long tail ... the argument being that since specialist scientists are essentially laypeople outside of their specializations, it's conceivable that "the crowd" can outperform these specialist communities when it comes to problem-solving tasks which involve a great amount of synthesis and generalist knowledge (which is honestly not today highly valued in academia). If you've had any of these thoughts, then realize that you are not completely alone: In fact, Rob Spencer at Pfizer has I think very well documented that the crowd can indeed be mined for solutions to some of the most challenging technical challenges. Pfizer has been doing just that for some years already, and they claim that the approach works.
Before continuing, I want to differentiate the two fundamentally different types of "citizen science". It can be either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down citizen science is just laypeople doing the legwork for some pre-existing academic work (many of the answers refer to this sort of work). I would argue that the far more interesting vision for citizen science involves enlisting the support of crowds towards solving certain problems which the critics of modern science have argued academia is itself struggling to address, and I call this approach "bottom-up". For the rest of this post, I will specifically focus upon bottom-up citizen science.
I would argue that learning the most common and most poignant critiques of modern science must be the first step towards designing a citizen science crowdsourcing platform, for the simple reason that laypeople are never going to completely replace the specialist. What you really want to achieve with these sorts of projects is a synergistic effect from combining the wisdom of crowds with the power of specialist science. An approach which fixes one or more observable problems with modern science could produce such an effect. But, like I said, to be sure that you are in the right ballpark, you have to become an expert in critiques of modern science. This first step is actually the one which Slashdotters seem to have the most difficulty with, and it is likely the reason why the answers to your question are not so great (sorry guys, downvote me if you must, but I am being honest).
If this is seeming too vague to be actionable, it may be useful to dig into a specific example. One very serious problem with the modern science approach is the infamous "publish or perish" problem: