It is a characteristic of our culture that we glorify scientific genius. Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking are just a few of the illustrious names from the canon of physics saints. Other disciplines have their own haloed ones. The role of the amateur scientist, in comparison with these greats, seems to vanish into insignificance.
Yet the future of science is the age of the amateur: the Internet will affect science in the same way it affected journalism, argues François Grey, the coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Center at CERN.
