The Amateur Scientist

There was a time when children were encouraged to do their own experiments at home. A lucky few got chemistry sets as Christmas presents. Others might have read books covering activities that ranged from star-gazing to building crystal radios.

As somebody who grew up in what was probably the golden age for young scientists, before the advent the Internet, I thought it would be interesting to see what encouragement exists online. It’s a rather sad state of affairs because, unlike books, websites come and go.

For example, citizenscientistsleague.com is now an Indonesian gaming website and the Society for Amateur Scientists’ website (sas.org) redirects to semesteratsea.org, which offers extended educational voyages. Fortunately, it is possible to revisit lost websites using WayBack Machine, where the most recent capture of content from the Society for Amateur Scientists is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20111101221659/http://www.sas.org:80/tcs/resourcesPage.html.

SAS founder Shawn Carlson also contributed to The Amateur Scientist, a column that ran for a total of 72 years in the pages of Scientific American magazine. The column was terminated in March 2001 but Carlson collated the articles and published them as a CD-ROM containing 1000 low-cost projects. A previous contributor, C L Stong, also created a compilation but his was a 1960 book that was limited to just 57 projects.

My copy of The Amateur Scientist CD dates from 2004: the default browser for that era was Netscape but I run it in Firefox and everything works except the free-text search box. Be warned, however, that some articles date back to the 1950s, when safety was simply a subset of common sense, and a few of the projects could be dangerous or even lethal if conducted without extreme care.

As well as the CD of projects there is also a bonus disc of software, much of which is shareware or demo mode. Sadly, the age of the software means some of it has to be run under DOS and none of it extends beyond 32-bit. To make matters worse, most of the external links are broken so finding newer versions of some items may be impossible.

There is, however, one bit of good news. As of 2020, OnScreen Particle Physics has been released as an unrestricted free version that be downloaded from https://www.onscreen-sci.com/ for both Mac and Windows platforms. The documentation isn’t immediately obvious as it is buried away in the program folder but, once found, it contains useful background information about particle detectors as well as operating instructions for the simulator.

On my Windows 11 PC, the program folder is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\OnScreen Science\OnScreen Particle Physics\. Note that this isn’t the default path as I shortened OnScreen Science Inc. by dropping the last word in the second part of the path during installation.

The very latest incarnation of The Amateur Scientist CD-ROM is dated 2010 but it is still available from online retailers such as Amazon although the publisher’s website, brightscience.com, is now owned by a company supplying anti-bacterial cleaning products.

As for other online resources, William Beaty’s Science Hobbyist website, http://amasci.com/amasci.html, is definitely well worth a look despite having last been updated in 2009. Amongst the website’s gems is an index of the few examples of The Amateur Scientist column that Scientific American has made freely available, http://amasci.com/amateur/sciam1.html. The remainder can be accessed only by the magazine’s subscribers.

There is a short history of the various contributors to The Amateur Scientist column in Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist.