Thanks metagirl, for the explanation. Something important may be revealed by the difference between how you and I responded to those same statements: You may need to find a generous, talented researcher-mentor . . . It is important to get to the edge of scientific experience of physical reality as soon as possible.
Your experience of "doing research on various topics or subjects and finding that the information available was vast" reminds me of my own experience of the ScienceWorld when, in retrospect I can see that I was lost, 1972-96. After Return To Australia (RTA) from overseas, I found myself doing computer and other work for researchers who seemed to be dropping only technological crumbs . . . They had PhDs. I did not. But my early experience of science was quite different, relatively lucky in retrospect:
As explained in my ebook and elsewhere, as a child I had intuited that "Earth's rough polar congruencies [inscribed as Antarctica, Arctic Ocean continental boundaries] are extremely unlikely to be a random coincidence". So what amazing luck that I happened to go to a small university of 1,500 students at a key time, 1960-65, when Geology was making real progress with Seafloor Spread.
I could see this great scientific progress being explained by Continental Drift explanation inconsistent with my childhood intution, wrongly from my point of view, AND one of Continental Drift's principal world exponents was very accessible there at the University of Tasmania: personable local/Yale Geology Professor Sam Carey . . .
This good luck continued: My very first research work was the research half of my BSc (Hons) qualification, the other half being coursework. My supervisor, K. B. Fenton very generously pointed to a photo of an oddly shaped Geiger counter discharge pulse in a journal article. I found that no one had done any work on relating Geiger discharge pulse shape to triggering ionisation trajectories. So when I became the first person to do this, finding an interesting range of pulse shapes, especially for paraxial trajectories (along the tube), with good agreement between theory and experiment, I was off to a fortunate start as a scientist. I had experienced and described a new piece of physical reality!
I was again generously directed in my first employment for the Swedish paper industry at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, 1966. My physicist boss, Lars O. Larsson had recognised the importance of measuring paper elasticity, impacting down onto the paper. I invented a device for measuring this and used it to show a strong correlation between paper elasticity and printability which nobody had seen before.
My next job took me from Sweden to proto-Silicon Valley, California two times and there was much other adventure and good fortune, two expeditions to Antarctica and so on, but my sense of the scientific frontier took a dive from 1972, until I again found something new, 1997, that nobody else had explained: my
www.nodrift.com
ebook thesis and subtheses.
