What do you understand as “doing worthwhile science”? That is, what would your measure of success be? (Publishing research? Being able to earn a living from looking at nature? Recognition of your expertise?)
There is a long history of amateurs and laypeople (meaning: people who do not earn their living as scientists) making meaningful contributions to science. Along with astronomy, nature observation (once referred to as natural history) is probably one of the areas with the strongest traditions of non-professional involvement. It doesn’t inherently require a lab or a lot of specialized equipment, just time and a willingness to go out and look at things and pay attention to what one sees.
Science has undergone significant professionalization since around the beginning of the twentieth century, meaning that it has tended to become institutionalized and segregated from other spheres of activity. This means that some types of scientific investigation have become out of reach unless you have access to funding and material resources (whether from academia or private sources) and to a certain extent it also creates social barriers (needing the right credentials or affiliations to participate).
And yet, alongside this, these other modes of scientific inquiry have not died out completely. Just as there are still local history societies in which amateurs participate alongside academic historians, there are also botany and birding and fungi and entomology societies that include and even embrace laypeople as members. Many of these societies publish their findings and these may provide valuable insights into species distribution or behaviors or habitats. Even in well-studied areas, I don’t think it is true that there is nothing left to discover or nothing that can be learned, though the insights may not be large and dramatic; long-term observation of a particular site may also be useful and more difficult to justify in an academic framework. Of course, the reach and impact of such publications probably depends a lot on whether they have an effective strategy for making their material available outside the limited circle of their members, but this has, no doubt, become easier in our era of digital publishing.
And I think at present the wheel is turning back around to a certain extent. There is increased awareness of both the potential value of amateur contributions (e.g. citizen science) as well as of the urgent need to increase expert capacity (including training of laypeople) in order to understand and respond to current biodiversity crises.
For a bit of context on my own background: I never considered a career in science. It never occurred to me that it might be interesting. Because the sort of science that we are taught in school, and the sort of science that most people engaging in academic careers today are expected to conduct, is largely experimental. And what I happen to be good at is looking carefully at things and asking what they tell us, which is a completely different approach. It is one that works well for disciplines like literature, but less well where quantitative methods and reproducibility are desired. So I would likely not have been happy in a traditional scientific career in any case. But I might have been happy as a nineteenth-century naturalist.
I am incredibly fortunate to have a job and a living situation that allows me a fair amount of free time to do what I please. Since discovering iNaturalist, this has involved a lot of wandering around and photographing bees and other arthropods. I have reached the point where there are clear limits to how much I can continue to learn and the usefulness of the data I collect as long as I do not have local networks with people who study bees professionally, whether in academia or in the government and non-government organizations involved in nature protection.
So I have come up against some of the structural barriers to involvement as a non-scientist and it has been fairly frustrating at times. For me, this has perhaps been exacerbated by both my own social hangups and being a somewhat recent transplant to a place where the local ways that social networks and affiliations are structured are often extremely non-transparent to outsiders and newcomers and may be difficult to penetrate regardless of what sort of activity it is.
However, I have discovered that once contact has been established, the reception has typically been quite positive. People are generally pleased to meet others with whom they have a shared interest and concern about the natural world and what humans are doing to it.
As part of this, I’ve been in touch with a local biology professor who studies bees, and what has struck me in learning about his work is how different his knowledge and activities are from mine, but that these different ways of investigating bees are complementary. (For example, my field identification skills are probably somewhat better than his, because I do it on a nearly daily basis, while his lab tends to do DNA barcoding instead, which offers advantages in terms of efficiency.) And that in some ways, while he has access to more resources, I have more freedom than he does, precisely because I don’t have to account for my time and spending or produce publications.