Helping Small-Time Scientists Answer Big Questions

Coventry, RI--Shawn Carlson's office is just down the strip from Dunkin Donuts, Captain Nemo's and Del's Lemonade in this old mill town just outside Providence.

Coventry seems like an unlikely headquarters for a MacArthur fellow and Ph.D. nuclear physicist, but it's a perfect fit for Carlson, who has dedicated his career to the idea that ordinary, everyday people can be involved in science.

In January 1994 he quit his job at the University of California at Berkeley to found the Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS), a national group dedicated to involving amateurs in cutting-edge science.

Over the past six years the society has grown to 1,200 members. With its move to Rhode Island in November, the SAS has hired its first full-time staffer.

Carlson's proposals for home science projects reach tens of thousands of people through his "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American. And his ideas have been noticed by, among others, Newt Gingrich, who devoted a paragraph to Carlson in an essay in the magazine Science published earlier this month.

Carlson's blend of populism, entrepreneurship and scientific know-how have are making waves in the scientific community.

"The people who never went through college are every bit as smart as the people who did," Carlson says. "Amateurs think of interesting, innovative, and inexpensive ways to get a job done real cheap."

Leaving the Academy

Carlson says that there's nothing contradictory about the head of an association for amateurs holding an advanced degree. The Ph.D., he says, is a "union card" that gets professional scientists to take him seriously.

Plus, with the specialization required of academics, he says his advanced training is, in fact, quite limited.

"I'm a professional nuclear physicist," Carlson says. "I'm an amateur everything else."

Carlson traces his real science education to his grandfather, a serious amateur investigator who accumulated mountains of rejection slips from scientific journals.

"My science education came on my grandfather's knee," he says. He's "been privileged to know Nobel Prize winners and members of the National Academy of Sciences. But in terms of sheer, raw creativity, my grandfather is the best scientist I've known."

In 1970, Carlson's grandfather made his first and only appearance in the scientific literature when C. L. Strong, then the author of the Amateur Scientist column, based a column on his experiments with plant growth under conditions of abnormal gravity.

Carlson, who was 10 years old at the time, says that within two years, he had figured out a solution to a question that that had eluded his grandfather in his experiments: how to grow plants under a gravitational force greater than zero but less than the earth's gravity.

The device he developed--using bicycle wheels and pantyhose--formed the basis for his fourth Scientific American column--and prompted a call from NASA scientists who hoped to use the technique in their research.

High Society

SAS links professional scientists with amateurs interested in helping with research projects, provides advice and assistance to amateur investigators, and publishes a magazine with experimental how-to advice.

Seismology and weather observation are the focus of the largest numbers of SAS members. Carlson attributes this partly to the universal fascination that these topics hold and partly to the existence of a number of other organizations that already exist for people with other interests, like the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, for birders, and the Association of Variable Star Observers, which works with astronomers.

But SAS's projects span all disciplines, from archeology to astronomy.

In one archeological project, the organization has linked several hundred amateurs with a team of professional archeologists excavating in the San Diego area. In another project, members measured muon flux--particles produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays collide with molecules in the air--with Forrest Mims III, the legendary author of the Radio Shack Mini Notebooks electronics series.

Carlson is currently working with members on a project suggested by an SAS participant to use a sturdy kite attached to a long cable in order to measure physical data about tornadoes. Current tornado measurements are made from trucks that are driven into the prone areas, but are often unable limited because the trucks' positioning is not flexible enough.

Many of the society's projects are reported in its quarterly journal, which until recently was edited by a superintendent in the Tuscon, Ariz. fire department.

Only the best columns are reserved for the 1,200 words Carlson gets every month in Scientific American.

He tries to vary the subjects of the column, from topics such as birdwatching to how to measure an insect's heartbeat.

Occasionally, SAS sells hard-to obtain products that are necessary for the projects in the column to amateurs, which gives a crude estimate of the number of people who are attempting the projects described. The most popular column demonstrated the phenomenon of audio illusions, which are roughly analogous to their visual counterparts; 700 copies were sold.

Carlson has just finished compiling a compact disk with all of the Amateur Scientist columns that have been written since the inception of the series as "The Backyard Astronomer" in 1928. He estimates that he sells 20 copies a day by mail order, and predicts an enormous expansion in sales when the product is picked up by the Ingram Book Group, a major distributor, later this year.

Looney Tunes

Carlson says that while there are many smart and serious amateur scientists in America, there are just as many crazy people with delusions of scientific greatness.

"When most people thing of amateurs they think of their nut file," he says. "Every scientist has a file filled with letters from people with the latest theory of space-time and God and creation that think they're the new Galileo."

Indeed, Carlson has made refuting pseudoscience something of a hobby. He has been involved in a number of research projects that aim to debunk astrologists' claims, including one that was published in the journal Nature in 1985.

He says he can't tell whether some of the oddest research proposals that he receives are serious or intended as parodies.

For example, one amateur proposed to study the facial expression of gophers under extreme pain by developing a device that would chop the animals' heads off the moment they emerged from their holes and drop them directly into a vat of liquid nitrogen so that their expressions would be preserved.

Carlson says that even after talking with the man, he could not determine whether he was serious.

But the most difficult part of his work is dealing with amateurs who make earnest but misguided proposals. His job is to provide thorough and rigorous evaluation of proposed research projects, even if that feedback is negative.

"We throw a lot of cold water on projects," he says. "We're not an organization that says, 'Come to us and everything will always be rosy.' Our promise is that we'll give you an accurate assessment. We lose a lot of members because of this."

Despite the occasional crazy person in the amateur bunch, Carlson suggests that it is the arrogance of some academics that causes them to be skeptical of amateurs.

"You run into some professionals who are absolutely against amateurs," he said. "Some people have enormous amount of ego. Some Harvard professors have an enormous amount of ego invested in the fact that they are Harvard professors."