Welcome to ALT-View
Have you ever noticed that in our modern society we have more technology and science yet less and less do we understand how it all works. Do any of us truely understand all of the gadgets and systems we use on a day to day basis, let alone the basic tenents and underlying Science (yep with a capital S) that makes our world exist and behave as it does. Is it important to understand? Well at Alt-View we think it is not only important to understand the science in our everyday lives but we also believe it is important to give a voice to new ideas and theories.
Did you know that a huge number of the most celebrated scientists in our history were amateur scientists?
Sir Issac Newton, although an Academic from Trinity College, Cambridge, was also Warden of the Mint at the Royal Mint and later also Master of the Mint.
Lets also not forget that a patent clerk proposed the revolutionary idea that mass and energy are interchangeable to a degree determined by the square of the speed of light. Albert Einstein eventually became a household name, and E = mc2 became history's most important and familiar mathematical equation. Yet even Albert Einstein is know to have been inspired by the discoveries of another great scientist, Michael Faraday, a man with little more than a basic secondary school education, who went on to become one of the foremost experimental amateur scientists in history.
An editorial in a leading science journal once proclaimed an end to amateur science: "Modern science can no longer be done by gifted amateurs with a magnifying glass, copper wires, and jars filled with alcohol" (1). Thankfully, as I look around my room and see wire, magnifiers and robotics components I feel that editorial may have jumped the gun a little. And we have discovered that we are not alone, there is plenty of good amateur science being performed and written up. So we thought, why not provide a place on the internet where interested amateurs can discuss papers and provide both short articles and fuller papers for review and comment.
So here we are Alt-View, an Alternative View, both by attitude and we hope content. However for that we need your input.........
References
1. Science Volume 271, Page 631 (1996).