Re:Holy shit, it's starting to happen... (Score 1)

It's a shame that there isn't something amateur scientists could do that would be truly useful to particle physics.

One thing you might look at are lattice QCD calculations. People have figured out a way to do some low-energy strong force calculations (the ones that are traditionally very hard), but they take a lot of computing power, and some very impressive super-computers are being built to deal with them. I have no idea how much work has been put into it, but it might be very useful to produce a distributed system to do these calculations. Volunteers could contribute code and processor time.