I think if you did become a professional physicist your chances of finding funding for this project would increase significantly. Even people who are sympathetic to your approach have no good reason for thinking you have the ability to make significant progress in this field. If you do have some qualifications or experience that would lead your readers to see that you aren’t just a wackjob you should really include it in your pitches.
Certainly, if I had a physics job already, this post would not exist; I would just be invisibly getting on with the project. Then there’s the option of writing a paper. Last time around, the plan was to do something small but solid, like prove a minor conjecture. But I ended up taking the ambitious path, and now I have some ideas to develop which are very cool, but not yet validated (or invalidated). I might talk about them on a physics forum, but talking about them here would prove nothing, since the audience isn’t qualified to judge them.
So yes, in terms of obtaining practical assistance, this post was a long shot. I had to actually run out of money before I was willing to sit down and write it. Afterwards I felt this immense relief at making a relatively uncompromising statement of my agenda. Hopefully a few other people got something from it as well.
I think if you did become a professional physicist your chances of finding funding for this project would increase significantly. Even people who are sympathetic to your approach have no good reason for thinking you have the ability to make significant progress in this field. If you do have some qualifications or experience that would lead your readers to see that you aren’t just a wackjob you should really include it in your pitches.
Certainly, if I had a physics job already, this post would not exist; I would just be invisibly getting on with the project. Then there’s the option of writing a paper. Last time around, the plan was to do something small but solid, like prove a minor conjecture. But I ended up taking the ambitious path, and now I have some ideas to develop which are very cool, but not yet validated (or invalidated). I might talk about them on a physics forum, but talking about them here would prove nothing, since the audience isn’t qualified to judge them.
So yes, in terms of obtaining practical assistance, this post was a long shot. I had to actually run out of money before I was willing to sit down and write it. Afterwards I felt this immense relief at making a relatively uncompromising statement of my agenda. Hopefully a few other people got something from it as well.