Quote:
Originally Posted by narky
Well, that's another issue. I'm already 39. I'm currently working, and I was planning to take my time, so lets say I choose the Curtin degree (it looks great) the bachelor degree would drag out. If I take 5 years to complete it I'll be 45 when I try to start my masters. I"m not too sure who'd be keen for that. much less have any hope at trying for a PhD.
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The process of learning has to be enjoyable, at least to some extent, with the sensation of "discovery and new vistas" making up for the occasional pain of "having to shovel into my head all that massive knowledge". Many many people have "fallen by the wayside" along the
long and rough and thorny path to becoming a professional astronomer, because they have had to learn so fast that they have not had time to properly integrate and become comfortable with the newly learnt knowledge, and also I think that frankly, the enormous stress and strain of it all made them reconsider the idea of becoming a professional astronomer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by narky
Sadly, I fear that I'm only a mere mortal, maybe I can just apply for a janitor spot when one becomes available. I was kind of hoping there'd be a few odd jobs going. I wasn't planning on running the place. Just helping out with the research if possible.
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They say that these days you have to have a PhD and several published papers before they even let you sweep the floor at a major observatory, which is essentially the argument made by Dr Duncan Forbes in the document I linked to. However, he is very much an insider in the astronomical research game, and there do exist various counter-arguments to this view,
for instance:
it is not necessary to know everything and be omniscient in astronomical/physical knowledge in order to discover something new.
Indeed, many astronomers made major discoveries without necessarily knowing all of the maths and physics, and
sometimes those professional scientists who did know everything were unable to discover much that was new!
A very good example, in this regard, is the utterly brilliant career of Fritz Zwicky, who was sometimes criticized for not knowing or even caring about all of the details of the physics, but who had great physical insight and also the ability to see and conceive new patterns and ideas which were instinctively rejected by lesser minds.
Other astronomers, such as Annie Jump Cannon, achieved very important advances in astronomy simply by spending their lives looking at and classifying a gigantic quantity of data, without actually fully understanding its meaning.
(this was the approach I took that lead to my discovery of a new Voorwerp-like object in GALEX imaging data; I simply looked at a whole lot of galaxy images with a view to finding anomalies and peculiarities)
A very good local example of people who discover important things without necessarily having all of the knowledge..... is of course our own BOSS collaboration of amateur astronomers.
So, from these types of examples, one can posit the observationally supported hypothesis that there do exist several pathways that can yield important astronomical discoveries, which are quite distinct from today's standard career trajectory to becoming a professional astronomer.
(though my argument still stands that you have to get your maths and physics sorted out in your head)
Here, for example, is an excellent Masters thesis that was good enough to land someone a job at a major observatory:
http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/xmlui/handle/10413/1943
(and it is about my favourite dust-lane elliptical galaxy!)
cheers,
Mad Galaxy Man