A celebratory account of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey highlights astronomy's culture shift to big science — but at what risk to individual ingenuity, asks Joss Bland-Hawthorn?
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Bland-Hawthorn, J. Last days of the lone astronomer. Nature 466, 1044–1045 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4661044a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4661044a
Neville Woolf
The astronomer alone has two meanings that should not be confused. First is being alone at night, peering through a telescope. That is past because the human eye is less sensitive than other devices we can attach to a telescope. Even amateurs have them.
But the other meaning that individual science is gone is not true. The role of the individual is steadily changing. Learners have access to the internet, and so the role of teachers has changed. Many tasks
require astronomers with technical skills so that they can earn their pay as part of a technical team. But then throughout history there has been a rare minority paid only to explore their own ideas.
Most research is done despite other commitments to time. So the creative individual soldiers on. His or her individual ideas may be tested against data banks just as easily or more easily than they can be tested against the sky. And discoveries will continue to go to the creative and energetic.
Emanuela Pompei
I completely agree with the concern expressed about understanding vs data availability. With so many data and even archival mining, coupled with the ever increasing pressure on young astronomers to "publish or perish" I have seen a marked increase of papers just presenting an incredible amount of data, but little physical discussion. As a simple comparison, the very nice paper of Tonry & Davis of 1979 (AJ 84, 1511) would almost be impossible to find today as a single paper, but would be spread over 3 or 4, one for the method, another for the observations, and a third for the discussion. And with such pressure, it is quite natural that the young people try to attach themselves to big groups and shy away from daring ideas (non-existing dark matter issues for example) or from small teams or dedicated personal projects. And this is a real pity.