this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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Easy. First you survey the existing literature for your theory. Chances are, somebody already came up with it, or, more likely, debunked it. If that's not the case, you write up a paper, presenting your theory together with its supporting evidence and submit it through the usual channels. I know that sounds pretty discouraging, but the chance of some rando contributing something meaningful are pretty close to zero
Pretty close to zero multiplied by billions of people yields results sometimes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-17-year-old-scientist-is-making-an-acetaminophen-alternative-that-is-less-damaging-to-the-liver-180986331/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/two-high-schoolers-found-an-impossible-proof-for-a-2000-year-old-math-rule-then-they-discovered-nine-more-180985357/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-teen-mathematician-hannah-cairo-disproved-a-major-conjecture-in-harmonic/
These people went through the process I described above. I'm not saying you need a degree to do scientific work. I'm saying you need to do scientific work to achieve scientifically relevant results.
Also, people seem to have this idea that you're going to come up with an idea or model of physics or an invention and you're just going to get a knock on the door from people in white coats with a briefcase of cash based on the pure beauty of your stoner idea about the shape of the universe or something.
You are literally more likely to win the lottery.
Bruh, you gotta work in life, even being smart you still have to work. You have to not only have your ideas, but you have to do the work to test your models, to prove your ideas and connect those ideas to other working systems. If you develop a new idea, it has to fit into existing science, and that combination becomes a "model" and then you have to prove your model works and that nature behaves as it predicts. This can take a lifetime, it involves not only being active and social and navigating your field, but also reaching out and being open and self-critical and humble. You cannot do it alone, especially as someone who hasn't spent their life making connections and navigating the academic world.
These aren't coming out of nowhere however. They are obviously being exposed to new material through their education and then extrapolating into some new tangent. These aren't epiphanies that just happen later in life unless you are working to understand these concepts. Not saying it can't be done, it just hasn't been done yet, and every generation builds upon the foundation of what came before it.
And this would be larger with better education.
Because it's not always about the "potential of the student" if there's no support or validation.
Finland didn't have a gifted program, you're not supposed to be better at anything than others. Except in sports, where it's the whole thing.
There were special programs for slow kids. But none for fast ones.
First grade teacher put me in an empty classroom to read by myself when everyone else was just learning what sounds different letters make.
Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol
Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.
Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.
I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.
Edit: in case it isn’t clear, by “new things” I mean new to me not new to the world; hence the aforementioned dead guys with published works on the topic. And when I say I was yeeted to the edge of math, I should mention that edge is well beyond my capacity to further. I had to learn a lot about notation for logic just to parse the paper, and I’m sure I still don’t fully understand it.
This is literally the heart of science and physics, it's how every single great mind has made advancements and gotten recognized, by building on the works of those who came before them and finding new ways to connect and test models. If you're "discovering" things that other people have before, that means you're on the right track, now you just need to put the work in validating and verifying your model or expanding on the models that others have developed.
You’re right, we build on the backs of giants. The issue is, typically, anything I discover myself is typically very far below the level where new science can be done OR it is far enough above my current knowledge that I just don’t even know where I’d begin.
Bi intuitionistic logic is the latter category. I was expecting truth tables and instead had to add a ton of words to my vocabulary like “Heyting Algebra” and “Kripke Frame” etc. just to understand what the paper was saying (not that I do fully understand what the papers are saying lol)
This is the entire point of academia though. If you were in a math PhD program you would have much better access to the resources to build the background knowledge you need to explore this topic, and then you would literally be paid to research it, and then possibly paid to manage a whole team of people interested the topic, and paid to teach classes on it and publish book chapters, and so on. People have this misconception (not saying you do, but this is a very common sentiment) that academia is this ivory tower which gate keeps knowledge, when the reality is that it's just a framework for enabling knowledge discovery. The reason most people outside of academia don't publish original research isn't some conspiracy. It's because engaging in original research is a full time job which often requires a lot of money and resources normal people don't have.
I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.
I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…
But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.
Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.
Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.
Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.
Yes but what if they feel REALLY clever???? U expect me 2 go thru all dat work? Ffs smh rn ngl u cap I swear.
Someone give them the Nobel price already!
He's got my vote.
Ongod ending wars is a habit of mine fr fr
I would love to know how many peer-reviewed papers have been published from independent authors with no degree or university affiliation, if any.
It definitely happens.
Give one example not published in a predatory journal.
Does this guy count? He's been peer-reviewed a bunch I reckon.
Depends if you count undergrad. One that comes to mind is the RWKV paper.
They have some chance if they wrote code to find a counterexample to some obscure math conjecture
Also, something that doesn't get nearly enough attention is how every great scientist who has changed the world with their ideas... were usually working off the foundational ideas and experimental data of people who came before them. Einstein polished his theories from the work of others, who also worked off the ideas of those who came before them.
A lot of Americans in particular have this individualist idea about science because that's the way the stories have been presented, "lone geniuses fighting the world."
You simply don't make advancements in science by yourself. Newton, famous isolationist, also worked from and with the work of others even when locked away inventing new kinds of physics and math.
Everyone thinks their stoner ideas about how the universe works are going to make them rich and famous, even though largely most great minds have lived and died normal lives, or even suffered penniless and unrecognized until well after their deaths.
and it's not uncommon to have 2-3 labs worldwide have exactly the same idea.
Yup. The number times we've seen shared credit for discoveries and shared nobel prizes simply because two teams were doing the same but unconnected work is amazing, and it points to how there is a cutting edge that will be in the same place no matter how you get there.
Here is the problem. These channels are heavily gatekeeped (gatekept?). Non standard theories are pushed to fringe publications and not read.
(See continental drift, hand washing and heliocentric model, big bang, etc.)
How is a lay person supposed to discover "the usual channels?" Or do you basically have to go to community college at least?
You will not learn everything about science that you need to criticize your own theories without navigating existing systems and channels. It's a part of the process. Yes, start in a community college, get to know everyone there, learn all you can from every source you can, use the internet to research but also be social and reach out.
Join math and physics forums, talk to people who know more than you, and every time someone knocks you on your ass, you reevaluate your ideas and sharpen them and present them again until people start seeing something and you will gain some level of support in academics and professors if your idea has merit.
Making breakthroughs in physics is a lot of work. It's not just pure ideas and theories, a lot of people with great ideas died poor and unknown. Like everything in life, success comes from navigating the hard paths that require socializing, reaching out to strangers, not being discouraged easily, and staying humble and passionate about the ideas, not the recognition.
This is how every great physicist has done it. This is a system that has evolved both as a natural product of having to weigh all new ideas carefully against known, tested ideas, and from centuries of physics and math work that have picked off a lot of the "low hanging fruit." IE: you're not as likely to discover something as simultaneously obvious and relatively easy to test as say, electromagnetic theory. But even in that case, it took the idea guy, Michael Faraday, befriending someone who knew more about math, James Clerk Maxwell for Faraday's ideas to be taken seriously.
A lot of people think science is "good enough" on its own because they digest too many surface-level stories about science and great minds without being exposed to the lifetime of work those people had to do to have their ideas explored in enough rigor to be accepted as part of our understanding of the universe.