They aren't doing it on their own. Most of these kids are working with established researchers who give them the shape of the project, as well as the tools and the expertise to accomplish it.
More recently the US scientific funding bodies have had summer programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise get that kind of access, but it's still the exception. It takes more than a summer to do this kind of work.
Edit: quick search for the father's name brings up this professor of biochemistry at UT Tyler:
I don't mean to take anything away from the kid or suggest that they don't work hard, are smart, etc., but these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
As someone getting a PhD at a top school and the first in my family to ever make it past high school I can assure you all these kids are raised from birth in a test tube by their parents.
>these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
Completely agree there, which kind of brings me to a related thought:
One thing I do wonder is, if you look at a few hundred years ago a lot of the inventors in math, physics, engineering, were a tiny group of people with access to resources and education. You're always reading the same names.
It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
> if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
That's how ML research is - all you need is sufficient compute and some torrented training data. It gives rise to a new problem of drowning in the literature. I think we simply don't have the tooling and institutions to integrate simultaneous scientific advancements from any significant portion of the population.
Meh. While I think the broad theme is fine (more access to education is generally good -- particularly when it comes to scientific literacy amongst the general public!), I think trying to encourage "research" in this way is largely pushing on a string. I can never figure out if this whole phenomenon of "science fairs" is just Kabuki theater for everyone involved, or if there's a core group of deeply deluded organizers who really believe that they're Making A Difference (tm) in scientific research, and are just completely blind to the career prospects of actual young scientists [1].
Time and experience has shown that "scientific innovation" cannot be made to happen faster by throwing more money at it, and a promising young person would be much better off by putting their talents to use doing something less random [2]. You can produce more good research in aggregate (maybe), but only in the same way that you can find more gold by crushing more rocks. Either way, you have to crush the rocks.
For example, the US government dramatically increased grad school funding through the 80s-2000s, and the primary outcome was an employment crisis amongst PhDs in the sciences. In the 40s-70s it was fairly straightforward to establish a career in research, but these days it's Hunger Games. I sort of fundamentally believe that the reason most science came out of the European aristocracy was not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic. Science is an avocation, not a vocation.
Science fairs and the like are a weird little subculture of college-application polishers, in part because nobody in their right mind actually wants to become a scientist. I think it's a safe bet that the young woman in this article ends up doing something more lucrative with her life (and good for her, if she does).
[1] Or even more cynically: the organizers do know, and are doing it because it builds their own careers.
I suspect you're correct about basic / true research and discovery of 'the new'.
Also probably about that US Gov funding. I've heard it's more about knowing how to write a grant than it is about being worthy of getting one. Better direction, better active identification of candidates (instead of the passive system that's biased towards large players), better stability. All of those would help.
However, there's a _lot_ of stuff that would be within reach, were only enough mass manufacture involved to drive down the adoption cost and break through the catch 22. Many things only need for gathering the correct sort of people, giving them enough room to work on a clear goal, and seeing where things really are.
The big business problems with that are figuring out if the return is plausibly worth the investment, and feeding the baby long enough that it can become a working adult.
Eh. Even if 1 in 10000000 of the kids that do "science fairs" end up in "science research" with at least one "scientific innovation", and the rest of them make $$$ in industry, that's them working. This comment is asinine on too many levels to fully rebut.
Agreed, I don't believe the science fair will push research, but we need to lay the groundwork to build a society of researchers instead one of office drones, going through JIRA tickets.
The comment above yours is a really poor strawmanning attempt.
> This comment is asinine on too many levels to fully rebut.
Thanks. I mean, it's not like I have direct experience with this stuff or anything, as one of those 9,999,999 who spent years of my life doing science, only to end up in industry.
Also, it's not like we would do better by skipping the years of science and going directly to the productive part, or that those (now grown up) "kids" are encouraged to continue circling the airstrip of life by the funding programs that are happy to pay postdoc salaries -- postdocs being the best kind of cheap, indentured labor -- to keep the dream alive just a little bit longer. After all, walking away from a PhD/postdoc(s) is only just a bit harder than chewing off your own leg to escape a bear trap.
It's clearly much better to waste the time of our smartest people by injecting false economic incentives into the system in an effort to socially engineer some kind of scientific command economy. Let's grind those rocks, and turn the cheap gravel into concrete to build glorious future!
Resentment is inherently anecdotal, but nevertheless a data point.
The issue with your argument is that you’re conflating two different points on the academic pipeline by shitting on high school science fairs because of the post-doc hellscape further down the line.
The latter is a special case of low wage, dead-end jobs that are inherent to capitalism, which can more generally leave anyone paralyzed in a vicious grind loop. Improving this may require capitalistic reform such as UBI and increased housing supply, but is the human condition of the quest for satisfaction in one’s niche.
The former is exposure to future possibilities that could satisfy the constraints of economic and intellectual well-being, likely through incremental progress but with the potential for breakthrough in either realm.
> not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic.
Aren't those effectively the same thing? At least in the given context where society doesn't have the resources available for everyone to live like that.
Effectively the same in terms of distribution of outcome, perhaps, but it's a bit like saying that it's really unfortunate that poor people can't afford their own manicured gardens, peacock collection and garage full of antique race cars.
Only someone well off could devote the necessary resources to have a garage full of antique race cars.
People who can afford a garage full of antique race cars only exist due to inequity.
What's the difference between those statements? As far as I can tell the latter includes the former while adding an implicit assumption about total available resources versus total population.
Apologies if it seems like I derailed things. Your comment was interesting but I didn't understand (still don't) the significance of the distinction you went out of your way to draw there. That said, I think the trailing remark that "only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic" really hits the nail on the head. Even today you can see elements of that, for example on certain parts of youtube. People with excessive expendable income occasionally do some really impressive stuff.
> It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
Yep, but we collectively decided that it is more profitable to put the best minds that manage to survive the education trials to either shaving off 0.0000001 cents of each financial transaction and to still make billions of dollars off of that or to sell ads so people get convinced they need to buy something. And those that get dropped along the education pipeline, we either let them stay on the road side and let them rot in poverty or we just use them as yet another source of labor ready to be exploited.
