The Crowd and the Cosmos

Chris Lintott is a professor of astrophysics at Oxford, co-presenter of the BBC's Sky at Night and the principal investigator of the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), an online platform for citizen science and people powered research with hundreds of thousands of contributors from around the world. This highly readable book is partly autobiographical but also deals with how science is done, especially at a time of advances in machine learning resulting in what he calls a data deluge, a phenomenon that also applies to CERN and penguinologists using automated cameras. He gives some interesting examples from the 19th century of pioneers in citizen science such as the astronomer James Glaisher and the meteorologist George Symons. Modern computing and distributed data open up citizen science on an unprecedented scale and have resulted in some serendipitous discoveries. The future is by no means exclusively one of the machine learning, since the human intuitive capacity for pattern recognition remains vital.