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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

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officermike@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Pretty close to zero multiplied by billions of people yields results sometimes.

smithsonianmag.com/…/this-17-year-old-scientist-i…

smithsonianmag.com/…/two-high-schoolers-found-an-…

scientificamerican.com/…/how-teen-mathematician-h…

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- Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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, you cannot do it alone, especially as someone who hasn’t spent their life making connections and navigating the academic world.
    
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- AlexLost@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- chloroken@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Oh I remember you! You’re the guy who claimed to be an engineer working with “ocular algorithms” when it turned out you were an undergrad who read a Wikipedia article about cuttlefish.
  
  Now you’re discovering “new things” in math because you were thrust to the bleeding edge of mathematics. Incredible stuff. Completely 100% real stuff.
  
  Please do future you a favor and stop presenting yourself as some intellectual giant. It’s not only cringe, but harmful to your actual academic growth. Some of the things you write are identifiable, what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write?
  
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  - zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I didn’t get the impression reading that that they’re presenting themselves as an intellectual or a researcher, just that they’re a nerd going down rabbit holes.
    
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    chloroken@lemmy.ml ⁨17⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    That’s because you haven’t worked in academia and haven’t seen undergrads fantasize like this with regularity.
    
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    AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeah I am an undergrad in engineering not math or physics or bio or anything like that. I just get curious and end up going down rabbit holes of niche science.
    
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  - AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    First, I said the “new things” were already discovered by dead guys. They’re new to me, not to the world. That’s the point of the comment.
    
    Secondly, I am an engineering undergrad and I don’t think I ever claimed to be working with “ocular algorithms.” I had been experimenting with spiking neural networks and was replicating a research paper on using a two layer inhibition structure to recognize MNIST numbers.
    
    That lead me to question how images were processed in the brain which lead me to read up on the structure of the eye (which you tried to call me out on previously) as well as the structure of the neocortex and the supposed function of each of the visual processing areas of the neocortex.
    
    I’m sorry if I’m coming off as condescending or as “an intellectual giant” I’m a kid with ADHD and curiosity. I like explaining the cool things I’ve recently learned.
    
    As for “what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write” they definitely already know. In fact my supervisor is pretty supportive of my random tangents into other kinds of science (so long as it doesn’t distract from the work I need to get done). Oh and remember how I said there might be an application for spiking neural nets in one of the grad students projects? My supervisor thinks so too! (though it’s not the one I was thinking of lol)
    
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- ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  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
  
  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.
  
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  - AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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)
    
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ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

submit it through the usual channels.

Here is the problem. These channels are heavily gatekeeped. Non standard theories are pushed to fringe publications and not read.

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PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- BananaOnionJuice@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Someone give them the Nobel price already!
  
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  - Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    He’s got my vote.
    
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  - PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Ongod ending wars is a habit of mine fr fr
    
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sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
How is a lay person supposed to discover “the usual channels?” Or do you basically have to go to community college at least?

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- ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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OrganicMustard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They have some chance if they wrote code to find a counterexample to some obscure math conjecture

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rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I would love to know how many peer-reviewed papers have been published from independent authors with no degree or university affiliation, if any.

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- Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It definitely happens.
  
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- Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Does this guy count? He’s been per-reviewed a bunch I reckon.
  
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- howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Depends if you count undergrad. One that comes to mind is the RWKV paper.
  
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