Science just costs too much, and scientists have paid too much to be considered scientists. The Ph.Ds that I know just want jobs that pay the bills, that pay off their loans. They do research because it is what gives them grants and enables the climb of the hierarchcy, not because they're driven by it. The system has beat out their lust of curiosity and exploration.
The root problem is cost. We have to make science cheaper. We have to put it back in the hands of the curious and adventurous. Science should be possible by anyone - even teenagers. If science can't be done by the young, the poor, the autodidacts, what's the point?
Currently, everyone is on the 'teach everyone programming' kick. U.S. states are now starting to require that everyone learns programming. But, what about science? Let's create the 'github' of science - where anyone with a hypothesis can create a notebook, gather up like-minded people to collaborate, gather data, analyze it, 'fork' others' research into new areas. That's how we will make it cheaper and accessible.
No, that is not the problem. The science may be expensive but the main cost is seldomly the researcher him- or herself. Equipment is expensive and always will be, I mean we are speaking about cutting edge science not counting birds in the garden. When I am doing Assays in the lab, its it easily 5 bucks per sample. But then I have 30 to 50 samples. And one Assay is only a small step in a long procedure for a small scientific advance. Similar, when I am doing scientific computation, I often cannot work with the nice and cheap Nvidia 1080 GTX because I am doing science and need reproducibility. Accordingly, ECC is a must and we have to afford a Nvidia Tesla Cluster. Do you really think scientists are not curious or exploring, thats ridiculous. It is just that you cannot make an expedition without funding, and that is not about the money you make, its about the ship you need. (just my two cent as someone whos working on a dataset that is worth 3 or 4 times my yearly income and could easily be 3 or 4 (or 10) times larger)
Well put. Modern science is an incredibly high-tech business in so many fields. Whether it's an expedition to Antarctica, building a new radio telescope or even "just" buying an electron microscope - you're gonna have to pay, and you're gonna have to pay alot.
There are still a handful of areas where amateurs could in theory do proper research without spending a few million dollars on lab equipment - ecology for example. But then we get to the problem of necessary knowledge: it take a few years of hard study until you even know the right questions to ask, which ones have already been asked, and how to interpret the results that you get.
In short: there is no short cut to modern science.
The root problem is cost. We have to make science cheaper. We have to put it back in the hands of the curious and adventurous. Science should be possible by anyone - even teenagers. If science can't be done by the young, the poor, the autodidacts, what's the point?
Currently, everyone is on the 'teach everyone programming' kick. U.S. states are now starting to require that everyone learns programming. But, what about science? Let's create the 'github' of science - where anyone with a hypothesis can create a notebook, gather up like-minded people to collaborate, gather data, analyze it, 'fork' others' research into new areas. That's how we will make it cheaper and accessible.