The Crowd and the Cosmos by Chris LintottCall Number: QB982 .L56 2019
ISBN: 0198842228
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Where once astronomers sat at the controls of giant telescopes in remote locations, praying for clear skies, now they have no need to budge from their desks, as data arrives in their inbox. And what they receive is overwhelming; projects now being built provide more data in a few nights than in the whole of humanity's history of observing the Universe. It's not just astronomy either--dealing with this deluge of data is a major challenge for scientists at CERN, and for biologists who use automated cameras to spy on animals in their natural habitats. But with so much scientific data, you need a lot of scientists--a crowd, in fact. Lintott found such a crowd in the Zooniverse, the web-based project that allows hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic volunteers to contribute to science. In this book, Lintott describes the exciting discoveries that people all over the world have made, from galaxies to pulsars, exoplanets to moons, and from penguin behaviour to old ship's logs. This approach builds on a long history of so-called 'citizen science', given new power by fast internet and distributed data. Discovery is no longer the remit only of scientists in specialist labs or academics in ivory towers. It's something we can all take part in.