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The title of this thread comes from https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2038753&postcount=23" in the Cosmology section of PF.
It started a mini-thread that has nothing to do with cosmology, but it's quite interesting, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion here.
The general topic I'd like to discuss is the extent to which someone "outside" the mainstream could get paradigm-changing, comparable-to-General-Relativity (or Darwin's theory of evolution, or ...) ideas published in relevant peer-reviewed journals.
There are some lead-in parts that seem easy to establish.
For example, anyone with a few euros and an internet connection can set up a website to publish any non-mainstream scientific ideas, and hundreds do. Further, in physics and astronomy there are sites like PF and BAUT which give those with such ideas the opportunity to have them challenged, and there are paper-based journals which explicitly welcome such ideas. So while there may be some modern day Ramanujan's, there are essentially no barriers to getting new ideas published.
Second, hundreds or thousands of really smart people with formal training in physics (etc) do actually read non-mainstream stuff! (the reasons why they use their time that way are, no doubt, many and varied, but are not important for this thread). If there is even the tiniest of hidden gems in any of the published non-mainstream stuff, it's quite unlikely to go unnoticed for long. What happens once it's noticed depends, of course, on many things. For example, the gem may be so poorly understood by its author that when some really smart person who spotted it, developed it, and later published it in a relevant peer-reviewed journal, that author (inventor?) may not have been able to recognise it.
This point may be somewhat contentious, so let's discuss it.
Anyway, I reckon that any really fantastic idea, like GR or the theory of evolution, would not remain obscure for long today, even if it were first published on some crackpot website*.
Which brings me to the thing I'm most interested in discussing: whence comes this apparently persistent myth that revolutionary ideas in physics would be difficult to get published, in relevant peer-reviewed journals? Why do many apparently smart and well-educated people feel this way?
* there is one important caveat to enter: English; a really cool idea published in a crackpot website in Tagalog (for example) may go quite unnoticed ...
It started a mini-thread that has nothing to do with cosmology, but it's quite interesting, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion here.
The general topic I'd like to discuss is the extent to which someone "outside" the mainstream could get paradigm-changing, comparable-to-General-Relativity (or Darwin's theory of evolution, or ...) ideas published in relevant peer-reviewed journals.
There are some lead-in parts that seem easy to establish.
For example, anyone with a few euros and an internet connection can set up a website to publish any non-mainstream scientific ideas, and hundreds do. Further, in physics and astronomy there are sites like PF and BAUT which give those with such ideas the opportunity to have them challenged, and there are paper-based journals which explicitly welcome such ideas. So while there may be some modern day Ramanujan's, there are essentially no barriers to getting new ideas published.
Second, hundreds or thousands of really smart people with formal training in physics (etc) do actually read non-mainstream stuff! (the reasons why they use their time that way are, no doubt, many and varied, but are not important for this thread). If there is even the tiniest of hidden gems in any of the published non-mainstream stuff, it's quite unlikely to go unnoticed for long. What happens once it's noticed depends, of course, on many things. For example, the gem may be so poorly understood by its author that when some really smart person who spotted it, developed it, and later published it in a relevant peer-reviewed journal, that author (inventor?) may not have been able to recognise it.
This point may be somewhat contentious, so let's discuss it.
Anyway, I reckon that any really fantastic idea, like GR or the theory of evolution, would not remain obscure for long today, even if it were first published on some crackpot website*.
Which brings me to the thing I'm most interested in discussing: whence comes this apparently persistent myth that revolutionary ideas in physics would be difficult to get published, in relevant peer-reviewed journals? Why do many apparently smart and well-educated people feel this way?
* there is one important caveat to enter: English; a really cool idea published in a crackpot website in Tagalog (for example) may go quite unnoticed ...
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