What is science? Part 3

In this third episode of the mini series trying to answer the question What is Science? I am speaking to Yvonne Gallagher, a lawyer and flying ant fan.

Yvonne has been watching the ants carefully since she was a child. But it was only in 2008 (with the dawn of the modern BlackBerry phones) that she started taking notes and dates of when the ants became flying ants. She started noticing that they were coming out at roughly the same time every year.

So, she was pleased to find that there was a citizen science project collecting data on this very topic.

So I asked her, as someone with no background in science, what she thought science was BEFORE she joined in with the flying ant survey. She believed it was school science: boring, theory heavy, equation laden school science.

Since joining the project she has realised that there is so much more to science than just what she learned at school. She realised that it was a way of going through life: of looking at the weather, or collecting data on flying ants.

And as someone who hated science at school, she said she would recommend anyone else to give citizen science a go. It gave her an opportunity to see how the other half (the scientists) live. And it was refreshing for Yvonne to see that this was what she had been doing all along anyway.

We would love to hear your views of what you think science is too! Has it changed over the years? Let us know by leaving a comment below or by getting onto the twitter discussions with the hashtag #CitizensofScience.