Snap! The light has gone on in your head, and you have a brilliant and revolutionary new theory of physics. But you’re not a professional physicist, you’re just an amateur who may or may not have any physics training at all. How will you get your ideas recognized?
Here’s the problem. There’s thousands and thousands of people thinking the same thing, and the vast majority of them range somewhere between simply incorrect and outright crazy. Fortunately, there’s some easy ways to tell where you fall on that scale or if indeed you might be on to something - it does happen, after all.
1. Is your theory mathematically specific? In other words, if your idea is not expressed mathematically you need to work on it until it is. If you don’t know the math, try learning it. That advice is perfectly serious; mathematics is not easy but it can be learned by any reasonably intelligent person willing to devote real time to it. Local libraries and colleges will be of great help. But until your theory can be described mathematically, it has no hope of making clear predictions about the results of experiments. You must be able to get actual numerical answers to problems using your theory. This is an ironclad requirement.
2. Does the theory make clear predictions? Any mathematical theory from Newton’s laws of motion to quantum mechanics to relativity necessarily makes predictions. Plug numbers into the equations and see what numbers come out. Do they make sense and do they reflect what we actually observe?
3. Are the predictions different from the predictions of current theory? If you think your theory can explain everything that accepted theory can, great! But if there’s no difference from accepted theory anywhere then you’ve not actually made any forward progress. What numbers do your equations produce that are different from the numbers standard equations produce? Can these differences be detected experimentally?
And that’s it. If you satisfy those three requirements you may well be on your way to a real discovery. If not, you have to keep thinking until you do. This is what professional physicists do pretty much all day!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Carl Brannen // Jun 7, 2008 at 2:02 am
Well, I’m an amateur and I got at least one of my ideas recognized. It ain’t easy. In fact, my formula for the neutrino masses was just mentioned in an invited talk on neutrino theory at Neutrino 2008 by Alexei Smirnov [15MB] see page 29.
Part of the recognition problem is that it is difficult even for professionals to get their stuff recognized. In addition to the above three, you must also be working on something that connects with stuff that other people are working on.
In my case, among the people who knew about Koide’s formula for the charged leptons, it was well known that the formula was incompatible with the neutrino oscillation data and therefore could not apply to the neutrinos. This fact was printed at least twice in the peer reviewed literature. Mohapatra and Smirnov were about to publish a review of neutrino physics with the incompatibility mentioned once again. I sent Smirnov an email correcting the error and showing that how Koide’s formula could be rewritten to a more natural form that would generalize.
I was also lucky on that formula in that it is so simple that it can be explained in a couple of paragraphs and needs only high school math. Professionals are very busy and don’t have time to read rambling theory papers by other professionals in their own field, much less from unpublished amateurs working on slightly different subjects. The other advantage is that I’m “all but dissertation” in physics at U. Cal., Irvine, and abd at U. Washington in mathematics. So I may make slightly fewer typos and gross errors (that make the professional reader immediately throw your paper away).
Amateurs need to understand that all physicists amateur or professional, have ideas all the time. Ideas are excuses to make yourself learn the mathematics necessary to flesh them out. The math is the hard part, not the idea. In my case it was Clifford algebra.
Sending ideas in to professionals (without mathematics) is like shipping coal to Newcastle. They already have plenty of ideas, what they need is mathematics. Years ago, my aged aunt, on hearing that I was studying physics in grad school, said “ah, yes, isn’t all existence really about vibrations?” I’ve been tempted to cite her as a reference ever since on the subject of wave particle duality.
And an amateur (or professional) should not be so worried about recognition while they are in the early stages of working on a new idea. What they should worry about is their own personal progress and the faith they have in their idea and in themselves. They should worry about recognition after they have obtained results that are so magnificent that they defy their ability to keep them secret. Until then, just publish enough to keep employed. For an amateur, that means publish nothing.
A great physics idea should have lots and lots of applications. Don’t worry so much about people ignoring you, just follow your faith and keep on knocking out the applications. When you run out of ideas, or when you your tenure review is coming up, then worry about recognition.
2 Uncle Al // Jun 9, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Horsepucky. Contemporary physics theory predicts what it is told to predict (proton decay half-life and Super-Kamiokande) A good experimentalist eats theorists for breakfast. What is the theory for high temp supercons?
http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Parity/cover.html
Yang and Lee, 1957. No numbers preceding, fast track Nobel Prize/Physics.
The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Reality is not a peer vote.
Oppose chemcially identical single crystal test masses of enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 alpha-quartz in an Eotvos balance. Do (metaphoric) left and right shoes vacuum free fall identically? It cannot be calculated. It can only be observed. Both GR (Equivalence Principle) and string theory (BRST invariance) can be empirically falsified at the founding postulate level by a footnote outside theory. No prior observation in any venue at any scale in the massed sector would be contradicted. Somebody should look.
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