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>because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with so
by moralestapia 10mo ago
>because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity
Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some parents who neglect him.
(Or any third-world country around the world; or even worse, a war ridden place).
How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of opportunity?
I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and sympathetic to its faculty.
You don’t choose what you want, you choose what you can have.
- mothballed 10mo agoLearn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated" roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor), buy rural Indiana land, build your own private observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the crushing burden of the academic grinder. Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo agoYou can't do private research because most astronomy is really data- and compute-heavy astrophysics. Optical searches are fun and everyone loves new comets, but comet hunting isn't academic science.
- mothballed 10mo agoInterestingly, when hunting on a computer or some new celestial object gets "hunted" by university astronomers, they call it "research" and don't smugly dismiss it as just some fun that can safely be gatekept from being called astronomy. As always, when working outside the system, it should be expected that semantics will be used against you, but if it's your interest, it needn't stop you nor need care about such unpersuasive arguments.
- cooper_ganglia 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_educat...