Content area
Full Text
In the movie "Good Will Hunting," an impoverished South Boston kid who scrapes by mopping floors at MIT astonishes prize-winning professors with his ability to solve--at a glance--math problems that have stumped the experts.
How likely is this scenario? Could a person with no specialized education instantaneously see his way through intellectual thickets impenetrable to the top people in the field? Even if he is a natural-born genius?
Conventional wisdom has it that science today is the province of experts bedecked with degrees and weighty with wisdom acquired through experience. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that amateurs and outsiders have made substantial contributions in fields ranging from chemistry to astronomy:
* A San Diego homemaker working at her kitchen table discovered dozens of new geometric patterns that experts had thought were impossible.
* A Texas banker came up with a formal conjecture (a kind of mathematical hypothesis) that amounts to an expansion, or "sequel," to the famous Fermat's Last Theorem, which defied proof for more than 300 years.
* An electrical engineer in Anaheim discovered two new exploding stars in one night.
Amateurs can't compete with professionals when it comes to high-tech equipment, university connections, academic prestige and funding. But in some ways, their status as nonprofessionals can be a plus.
"Amazingly, lack of formal education can be an advantage," says mathematician Doris Schattschneider of Moravian College in Pennsylvania, who helped "discover" the San Diego homemaker now hailed by mathematicians for her work. "We get stuck in our old ways," Schattschneider said. "Sometimes, progress is only made when someone from the outside looks at it with new eyes."
There was nothing unusual about amateur scientists 200 years ago when science was something people did in their parlors and backyards. Science was not yet sequestered in its own private world, with obscure language and strict academic requirements barring all but highly trained experts.
"If you go back far enough, everybody was an amateur," said UCLA chemist Charles Knobler, who uses methods developed by amateur Agnes Pockels in his work (see accompanying box). "John Priestly, who discovered oxygen, was a minister." Benjamin Franklin was perhaps the ultimate amateur. The 18th century statesman not only discovered that lightning is electricity, he also invented the...