Could Einstein, being a patent clerk, have gotten his papers published these days? Is there room for non-professionals, or people outside the system to come in and disrupt it? It seems that there's a lot of disregard of wild alternative theories like quantum mechanics would have seemed in the early 20th century.
Einstein was a patent clerk at a time when government funding for science was vastly lower than today and there were research and teaching jobs for only a small fraction of physics PhDs. Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider.
> Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider.
Didn't he get his PhD awarded only after he was recognised for his work?
His “miracle year” of 1905 was, in order, on the topics of the photoelectric affect published in June, Brownian motion (his PhD thesis) published in July, special relativity published in September, and matter-energy equivalence published in November.
I think so. For Einstein, job #1 was to bring his work to the attention of some of his peers, and it's even easier to do that today, when you can just cold-email a Nobel laureate or a Fields medalist.
All name physicists are flooded with crank emails of the >>EinSteIn WaZ tEh RoNg I aM cLeVeReReR!!1!<< type.
So the odds of a truly revolutionary theory getting taken seriously based on a cold-email are significantly less than zero.
The problem is very obvious - science was both more open and more selective a century ago. There were far fewer PhDs, but they were of far higher quality. And the networks were smaller, friendlier (mostly), and more personal.
Now we have an industrialised corporate physics industry turning out thousands of PhDs a year. Most have been steered away from fundamental questions towards tweaks of the Standard Model - because anything else is career suicide and impossible to get funding for.
And after all of that, there's far more money in finance. So that's where the best people go to waste their talent.
So email a non-name physics professor. They'll probably be clever enough to recognize the revolutionaryness (?) of a theory even if they couldn't invent the theory themselves.
Math, unfortunately, has never been my game. How often does a likelihood or probability become significantly less than 0. Isn't 0 the floor? Or is 0 the 50/50 value?
I agree on the wasting of money for the wallpaper pattern that is called a degree.
My understanding is that there is still disagreement around this. One of the lines of debate is whether his wife Mileva Marić did most of the grunt-work that was necessary to prepare his papers to the level of acceptance for scientific publications at that time.
The overall narrative that seems to emerge is that he was undisciplined as an undergrad at the ETH in Zurich, and never would have landed a graduate posting, and the patent office job was a fallback. Mileva was more diligent and helped him out quite a bit.
