It takes a great deal of work and dedication in order to develop an idea or concept which can be used to change the world. This is what higher education was originally intended to do: provide people a stepping stone to help them on the way to greatness. The intent is still there today, although there are those who believe that the modern education system is designed to standardize people’s knowledge bases so that they can be used as interchangeable cogs in assembly lines and factories.

Although providing educational assistance is laudable, it can get in the way of truly groundbreaking developments by giving the learner a set of principles and beliefs that tend to restrict his or her growth by saying how things should be. Entering any investigation with preconceived notions tends to bias how the investigation proceeds and limits how far from the norm things develop.

In order to make truly groundbreaking discoveries, one has to go boldly where no one has gone before. We’re talking six or seven standard deviations. This may be impossible if there are any influences reining the inventor back in towards the center. Which in turn means that the more formal education a person has, the less likely he or she is to truly change the world.

The following interchange between Han Solo and Rey in The Force Awakens demonstrates this quite well:

Han Solo: Watch the thrust. We’re going out of here at lightspeed.

Rey: From inside the hangar? Is that even possible?

Han Solo: I never ask that question ’till after I’ve done it.

If an educational institution has spent decades promulgating the theory that something is impossible without mathematically proving it as such, give it a shot. That initial observation may have been faulty, and by the time someone decides to reconsider it there may be too much inertia in academia to see it any other way.

The message is simple. If you truly want to change the world, study it by yourself, starting from basic principles. Don’t treat accepted knowledge as gospel, or you will follow the same path trodden by thousands of academics beforehand. A truly groundbreaking discovery requires breaking a new trail and having the fortitude to stick to your beliefs in the face of overwhelming intellectual — but myopic — adversity.

You would be surprised how many of the greatest inventions or discoveries were made by amateurs. Take, for example, the development of accurate measurements of longitude.

The ancients found it easy to determine a location’s latitude, but longitude is a much more difficult proposition. The general consensus was that determining one’s longitude had to be done via a process called the lunar distance method, based on determining the distance between the Moon and a certain star and looking it up on a table based on the times at the home port. The key here is that this method involved astronomy and not clocks. People had already considered the possibility of using clocks (where a 1 hour deviation means 15 degrees longitude). The issue, however, was that developing a clock accurate enough to survive rough seas was believed impossible.

Enter John Harrison, an amateur clockmaker. He was unaware of the consensus that clocks would not work as a reliable means of determining longitude at sea. However, as is is often the cases with amateurs, ignorance was bliss, and he decided to give it the old college try. It took him decades to finish development, but in the end he stunned the Board of Longitude — consisting almost exclusively of astronomers who looked at him with a great deal of contempt at first — and presented the world with a working chronograph. Today the lunar distance method is long forgotten and everyone carries wristwatches around on their arms (or at least once did before the advent of the smartphone).

Albert Einstein was also an amateur. He developed the theory of relativity, a truly groundbreaking development, while working as a patent clerk. His gift was to envision himself riding along a beam of light in a way none of the other scientists had even considered. Once again, thinking differently in a way not encouraged by academia lead to a change in worldview.

Most educational systems do not do well with profoundly gifted students. In some areas they may already be smarter than the teacher, which can lead to some awkwardness. Furthermore, the tendency to standardize students (especially in the modern era where they teach to a test rather than truly allow gifted students to excel) deprives them of the opportunity to grow into geniuses. I should know: having already been a gifted math student in the early grades, I spent many years doing nothing in math class as I already knew the material. Imagine if I still had been granted the opportunity to learn more advanced topics.

This tragedy can occur in areas in other than science as well. I would argue that most, if not all, of the great spiritual leaders of our tradition were exceptionally gifted individuals who were never recognized by their community. Jesus very likely saw himself as an amateur theologian. So did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.

The problem persists even today. I personally know several profoundly gifted amateurs who are developing innovative views of the world and are having trouble getting traction or publicity without official academic endorsement. In fact, had Einstein or Harrison not managed to have been able to get the backing of at least one important patron, they would have likely never been able to publish their discoveries in any academic journals!

We will start with a young man who, at age 20, is working to develop an entirely different way to understand mathematics without even a bachelor’s degree. He is an undergraduate at a prestigious university who is not challenged with any of the undergraduate courses and wants to replace them with some graduate level ones. The school cannot handle his brilliance and is forcing him to toe the line, much to his chagrin. He tried changing schools several times and none of them were able to handle him.

What’s more, he cannot find any academic advisors to endorse his work as they don’t understand what he is doing either. His mother (not an intellectual slouch herself: she went to Wellesley) does not understand what he is doing, and I have a vague idea but have no details (though he can relate to me better than to his mother). Even the schools he wants to attend for a PhD — MIT and Harvard — cannot find anyone to mentor him even though they are fully aware of his abilities and are crawling all over each other to try to entice him to apply after graduation.

We cannot let this man’s accomplishments simply be ignored because he is an iconoclast and there is no way to fit him into the existing system. If necessary, change the system, regardless of how hard it is.

We next have a profoundly gifted woman who is trying to reconcile science and religion using theories which she supposedly can back up with solid scientific evidence. She has already published a book on this, but since it falls into the gap between science books and religion books it has failed to find a suitable audience. If anything, the title (Post Quantum Reality) seems to be more New Age than actual science. Interestingly, I have posted on similar topics, though I have not actually read her book (though I plan too).

Her book is supposedly unusual in that it backs up the standard New Age philosophy with actual scientific evidence. If there is actual proof supporting the theory it makes it much more plausible.

Note that it’s possible that her publicity may also be suffering from the canard that women cannot do science as well as men. Needless to say, this assumption is completely false. More than half of the students at MIT were female last time I checked (up from 1/3 when I was there), and I myself dated an astrophysics professor for four years.

She told me she was considering rewriting it for a more populist audience. I told her that I was concerned that would involve dumbing it down too much and that the hard science should be submitted as an actual academic paper. She will have to play the role of Janus instead of Debra, showing a different face to two worlds in order to transmit the information to both.

Her website actually laments how much the academic community is resistant to her ideas.

You might also wonder how a complete outsider, working alone and unknown, could have figured these things out. Most scientists and clergy are intellectually or economically invested in a specific belief system. In contrast, the author, a rather reclusive, but well-established, award-winning artist, approached these questions unbounded by ideological constraints of what can or cannot be. Or, as Albert Einstein said, “Everyone knew it was impossible, until a fool who didn’t know came along and did it.”

An artist solving major science problems? Where did that come from? Well, Leonardo da Vinci comes to mind.

Do you know any other amateurs who develop unusual theories which you cannot necessarily relate to or understand but seem to have the potential for changing the world if they pan out? Do what you can to support them. Even if there is a 1% chance of them being right, the advances humanity can make if you win the bet certainly outweigh the inconvenience of hearing what they have to say.

The photo is from of someone performing medieval cooking in Croatia. Clearly, he’s been enlightened. The irony is that although this method was more popular in the Middle Ages, it’s now become a hobby. It’s quite possible that this man may discover a way to perform this job which has never been thought of before. However, it is likely to fall on deaf ears as the demand for that knowledge is all but extinct in the modern world.