The Crowd and the Cosmos by Chris Lintott

Author:Chris Lintott [Lintott, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192579546
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

These minutia have now been edited—by volunteers—and are available online. The weather data has been fed into climate models and the fog of ignorance Phil and his Met Office colleagues are fighting has receded just a little. Having completed the Royal Navy’s First World War logs, Old Weather volunteers have taken on more difficult challenges, including the amazing records of the early Atlantic whalers whose battles with the ice preserve a record of exactly where that ice was.

And the list goes on. In 2010 I moved, temporarily, to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Adler’s a marvellous place, sitting on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan; my office was underneath the best view of the city skyline available anywhere. Founded in 1930 by Max Adler, a businessman who’d made his fortune from the Sears catalogue empire, it’s nearly unique as a place which employs academic researchers as part of the museum staff. They’d spotted the potential for volunteers to contribute to science long before, and were excited about Galaxy Zoo. While I was there, a grant from the Sloan Foundation meant we could build a proper development team. I soon moved back to Oxford, but Arfon moved out to Chicago and the Planetarium has hosted a large part of the Zooniverse team ever since. Before too long we were building projects that helped researchers understand plankton, study animals on the Serengeti, delve deeper into particle physics, and much, much more.

From trying to understand galaxy evolution to old whaling records and gazelle spotting was quite a journey. In each project, I’d been worried about getting sufficient volunteers, but each time I was elated by the sheer power of people’s desire to help. The ability to spend a few minutes trying to understand the Universe (or the Earth) was apparently the kind of thing people wanted in their lives, and as we tried new and more complex things I remained in awe of quite how each small effort could add up to something grand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.