Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Aren't we at a time when progress is quite slow (end 20th and early 21st centuries with big teams and a lot of funding)?
Perhaps, but there was a lot of low-hanging fruit (as a sibling comment mentions).
Biology then was taking a cup of pond water and putting it under a microscope. Biology now is gene sequencing and using HPC clusters to search through FASTA files.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTA_format
What kind of new discoveries are available to backyard astronomers versus using JWST data?
There are lots of projects a backyard "citizen scientist" can get involved with, some even using a backyard telescope, but also covering a range of fields (for example, counting butterflies, providing computing power). Many of the ones in astronomy involve data from JWST or other telescopes, so you do not need to compete with JWST: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/
I guess I do not really understand the comment.
I think science is a good thing for society, and I think giving interested volunteers the chance to participate in science is good, and maybe it also helps keep science accessible and accountable. If it enables science to happen that would otherwise not happen, then that is even better.
And not all citizen science is about crowd-sourcing data analysis--some of it is simply observing your backyard.
Is this true? I have far from an exhaustive knowledge of research but most of the advances I can think of were by academics: Maxwell, Bohr, the Curies, etc.
Einstein was one notable exception but he was trying to get hired by universities during his miracle year; antisemitism likely played a role. Soon after he was hired and forever after led the academic life.