Comment on We gotta be more encouraging

• ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

  source