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.
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.
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?
Edit: Tl;dr this is a child doing a Mutahar and isn't handling being called out very well. Zero accountability and everything you'd come to expect from a budding charlatan. Saved by mods for "civility".
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.
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.
That's because you haven't worked in academia and haven't seen undergrads fantasize like this with regularity.
Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol
I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.
Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.
I'm shaming you for being a liar who misrepresents himself.
I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.
I also have not lied.
So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?
Ah I think I know what this is about now. If you come from a country like Canada where “Engineer” is a protected designation, then I can understand you thinking it’s a lie and I apologize for that misunderstanding.
In America and my state specifically, the word “professional engineer” is protected and requires certification, but “engineer” does not. There were several people in the civil engineering firm in my hometown who were called engineers and only had highschool diplomas, but that didn’t change the fact they were experienced engineers and called engineers.
In other fields of engineering, like software engineering, you’ll find lots of people with the title of engineer without a degree.
I’m sorry that you felt mislead by me calling myself an engineer despite the fact I’m still in school and only an engineer by title for my research. But that was not an intentional deception, simply a discrepancy between our cultural definitions of the term/title.
Also, I have made it far and will likely continue to push on in academia (though I’d like to get out of this country before starting a PhD so that complicates things).
Anyway, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you and that my attempts to explain/defend myself have come off as petulant. I’ll stop engaging with your comments and you should feel free to block me if you don’t want to come across my posts and comments again.
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to explain things more clearly/calmly sooner and for what it’s worth I’ll try to avoid calling myself an “engineer” without a qualifier stating I’m a student or researcher now that I know some places are more strict about the term.
Edit: Might be important to mention that there are still regulations in civil engineering (and other fields) that require certification at some step. Like any design of infrastructure in my state (and I think most others?) requires the stamp of a certified Professional Engineer. You can create designs without the certification but if it’s going to be used by lots of people or affect them adversely through failure, you are supposed to get it checked off by a PE before it gets built / put into use.
You sure you're not just oversensitized to it? This feels like a false positive.
When an undergrad says "I'm an engineer" there is no debate, it's a case of lying. Nobody can begin their studies and skip to titles. Nobody starts law school and calls themselves a lawyer. Nobody starts an undergrad and calls themselves a scientist.
The only people who do this are children who wickedly mispurport themselves to facilitate authority and look smart. It's the definition of being a charlatan.
Are you sure you're not under sensitive to people straight up lying and denigrating an entire, important industry full of folks who actually waited to graduate and work in the field before dubbing themselves a professional?
It's normal where I live for students to say that. You can argue with that, but then I'd say it's not worth singling out one person.
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)
Edit: Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned cuttlefish in that comment stream you linked…? You mostly just said I didn’t know what I was talking about and then after I showed you the sources I’d drawn from you started asking questions about my research and education. Are you just upset that people downvoted you in that thread?
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!
Ongod ending wars is a habit of mine fr fr
He's got my vote.
They have some chance if they wrote code to find a counterexample to some obscure math conjecture
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.
and it's not uncommon to have 2-3 labs worldwide have exactly the same idea.
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?