How to Become a Gentleman Scientist

Out of the ivory tower.

As has become apparent in recent weeks, the system for funding scientific research in the United States is currently in freefall. It is not remarkable that it is happening, due to increasing stagnation, and a severe reproducibility crisis. While each day reveals a further collapse of such federal institutions, there has never been a better time to be an independent scientist. I have outlined some of these concepts before in The Gentleman Scientist, but due to recent events, I thought it necessary to provide practical guides.

It is a common misconception that science is a gargantuan endeavor only to be undertaken by governments and international corporations. This stems from the enormous expense of some scientific equipment, from space telescopes to particle accelerators. However, most scientists never work directly with such equipment; they typically analyze data on computers. Therefore, there is no reason at all why any reasonably intelligent citizen with a decent amount of random access memory cannot perform such analysis on his own whether he lives in Deadhorse or Key West.

There are a set of skills which every aspiring scientist must master. The act of science requires one to first posit hypotheses, then test them, and finally to synthesize theories from results. The formation of hypotheses and the development of theories require above all else a firm grasp of the data under consideration. To become an independent scientist, you must first become well versed in the art of data analysis. If you are a software developer in that field, you might already be halfway there. This is best accomplished with a high level programming language, such as Python or R. If you have not already, begin by learning the fundamentals of one of these languages. The next step is to find a problem to study. This is best accomplished by looking at studies which academic researchers have abandoned due to cost or other reasons, there are a wide variety of these. It is not hard to discover completely unexamined data on a multitude of government websites.

Perhaps the most difficult task is to test hypotheses. While it is often possible to test by examining output data, it is very frequently necessary to generate such data by oneself. It is at this phase when a well-equipped home laboratory is most useful. Instrumentation is often considered to be prohibitively expensive, but this often turns out to be a misconception. In fact, it is possible to purchase equipment to measure most physical quantities for under one hundred dollars. The examination of the natural world is often something that lends itself well to the gentleman scientist, and is currently emphasized far too little in the academic establishment. Once this is combined with a few of the miracles of modern biotechnology, it is very easy to venture into uncharted territory.

Generating theories from your work is mainly a matter of expending mental effort. However, publishing them as an independent researcher is another matter entirely. At this point in time, it is quite difficult to publish if one is not affiliated with an established institution. So-called open access journals often have extremely low standards, and publish results which are unverified and frequently turn out to be false. To solve this conundrum, I hope to establish a new forum with which independent researchers can view the theories currently being advanced by gentleman scientists, and attempt to reproduce them. I believe that such a system would make rapid strides towards solving the well known reproducibility crisis.

I shall now provide a list of resources which I believe to be indispensable to the aspiring gentleman scientist. It is behind a paywall, so by all means upgrade and read on!