Devils advocate in me can't let this slide... look up "accidental scientific discoveries." My favorite is the Michelson-Morley experiment. They were looking for evidence of luminiferous aether. Their results didn't support their theories, but when a young Einstein happened to look them over, Special Relativity was born. If those guys hadn't been looking for something silly, we might still think Newton is right about gravity (okay, maybe not, somebody would've figured it out by now, but you get the point, right?)
No, because in the next paragraph you point out that what I said is actually correct.
(Michelson-Morley is not an "accidental" discovery. Special Relativity was the hard work of one educated and intelligent young man to explain the results of several experiments that were contradictory to the current best theory.)
In fairness, all of the accidental breakthroughs were made by professionals, or at least students of a field, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration you know...
Which is what I said. People making discoveries know the field. I didn't say the discoveries weren't accidents.
...but many of their discoveries were in fields outside of their professions.
Irrelevant. They were knowledgable of the field in which they made the discovery. Einstein may have been a patent clerk, but be was a highly competent mathematician and physicist.
Please give me one example of someone making an accidental breakthrough in a field of which they had no more knowledge than the average layman.
I'm sure there are some, but I sort of doubt the "many" part. Especially given how many people work on discovering things within their own fields. I don't see how discoveries by someone in a field outside of their profession could be any more than a tiny, tiny proportion of discoveries in general. It's possible that you'll have a tough time finding one, if you don't have something in mind already.
We don't expect Formula 1 races to be won by amateurs with little to no driving experience. Occasionally there are exceptional drivers who in their genius can perform at levels that their experience would not suggest was possible, they can just jump in a car and be quick. But this is exceedingly rare. Why would it be any different in science or engineering?
Once upon a time that may have been possible, a couple of thousand years ago when you could observe ships disappearing bottom first over the horizon and infer that the world is round, but most of the low-hanging fruit in science was picked long ago. It's not enough to merely be intelligent any more to observe new things about the universe, you need to be intelligent AND take advantage of the centuries of work done by others.
And again yes, there's a strong consensus in the scientific community that the laws of thermodynamics will never be overturned. But still, people pursuing so-called crazy ideas sometimes contribute (unintentionally perhaps) to real scientific progress.
Never be overturned, yes. Never be modified, no.
The contribution from the "crazy ideas" is generally to refine a concept or theory, not to overturn it entirely. Even things like quantum mechanics doesn't invalidate a lot of the older theories, it simply defines boundaries within which they are reasonable approximations.
He's looking for feedback, he got it (even if he might not be able to understand it yet, try again after he's passed physics,) let's leave it at that. Kid certainly doesn't deserve any hate for bringing up the subject, gentle ridicule tops.
He didn't get any hate for bringing up the subject, he got answers. Twice.
He ignored them, and got what you get on the internet when you ask for advice and then ignore it.
I wrote him a PM apologising for assuming that he was lazy, and trying to encourage him to keep having ideas but not to get too attached to them. I also tried to give some advice on how better to pursue his ideas.
To quote a part of it:
You had the idea. That bit was good. You just need to follow through on the hard bit: trying to shoot yourself down. It's tough, but once you get good at it you lose any fear of being wrong because that's what you were trying to do.
Take your next interesting idea (because if you had one you're going to have another one), go to Wikipedia or Google, and try your hardest to find if someone else has done it already. See if you can understand how it might work without building it. Make a model, if you can.
Don't get too disheartened, your only mistake was not knowing when to say "OK, this idea doesn't work, on to the next one". Don't get too attached, and you'll do just fine.
We have no idea whether he's a kid or a grandfather, although from his responses and writing style it seems likely that he's young. If he's young then I'd prefer that he takes encouragement from having ideas, but he also needs to learn how to pursue them if he ever hopes to make anything of them.
Nobody ever had ONE good idea and it turned out to be right. They had 99 wrong ideas and by the 100th one they'd figured out enough to have a good idea. If you don't have the confidence to prove yourself wrong, you'll never discover anything.
