Independent Research

How to do research outside uni? My dream is to have my own lab and be a mad scientist without having to advance through endless degrees and professor's cocks.
Also, do garage labs really work? They ones I've seen are dirty and disorganized as fuck.

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news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346697
cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/toolkit13/how-to-do-math-and-tcs.pdf
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If you have to ask, and not find out for yourself, it's never going to happen.

the laws of science are the same but it probably won't work because:
1) you need to be rich to afford some types of equipment that you only have access otherwise by sucking professor's cocks
2) despite what you might think, people don't do research isolated anymore, science is way harder than it looks

No bully, user, I've been reading a ton and still can't figure it out. Im from a third world country if that helps.

Thanks user, money is obviously the biggest obstacle. I don't want to work alone just not under someone else.

Actually, even bothering to think about this possibility enough to ask about it, significantly increases the odds that it will happen. The odds are still low overall, but this "if you have to ask" meme is nonsense. Most people simply don't even think outside the box to begin with.

OP, if you actually look into it, you'll realize you don't literally *need* university affiliations for almost anything. Affiliations are just a hueristic lazy peers and referees use to judge your credibility, often at the expense of actually thoroughly reading your work. So your best bet is to invest your time networking with people in your specific field, like by going to conferences and such, so that it doesn't appear as if you're a random nobody out of left field when you begin trying to publish your work.

Other than that, make sure to study research methodology, stats, philosophy of science, and science writing, before you go about conducting your research.

$nice$

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don't be an idiot. go into an university and get close to professors doing interesting research. let them guide you.

it's like saying you want to be the best chess player in the world, but don't have to advance through tournaments and chess trainers and playing with other people.

There's no short cut.
The only way to become the head of a lab is to rise through the ranks, demonstrating you're competent. Still no guarantee.

These days, even marrying money (well, maybe if it's one of Gates' or Bezos' kids) isn't enough.

I'm talking physics for the most part. Some fields can still be entered fairly cheaply. Biotechnology. However, you're unlikely to make a major advance on your own and I was just reading this morning that the Government is cracking down on people using CRISPR to create novel microbes or plants in their kitchen.

Look around yourself at the physical world. Find something that you're curious about. Think about it and try to figure it out. Look for a book or a person that might have some accurate information on the subject (beware nonsense). Learn any language, reasoning, mathematics, and factual data that can help you understand it. Observe, think, research, experiment. One day, if you try very hard, you might understand something that no one else in history ever understood before. Then it will be your turn to write a paper or a book.

Got the source on the government thing?

>implying you can't connect with researchers in your field without a university, as if email and conferences aren't a thing
>inb4 "what's le sci-hub and libgen of chess?"
you really suck at analogies.

what field? Physics, probably impossible unless you stick strictly to computational stuff, and even then you're going to need a lot of money for computers. Chemistry, maybe, since green chem is a big thing and there is a lot of interest in finding replacements for reactions that normally require inert environments and difficult to handle reagents. If you can come up with a catalyst or reaction scheme that you can run in your garage that replaces one that normally requires a glovebox to implement correctly, you've got something worth pursuing.

Alot of scientific equipment is in the 100,000s to 1,000,000 dollar range (I'm thinking vacuum chamber equipment here). If you build it yourself I'm thinking you'd be able to save an order of magnitude or more. Most of the cost is know how and labor I think.

you can be a mathematician becuase you won't need physical stuff to test

Most cost at the university is administrative wages and equipment.

You get someone who is smart enough to work things out, and has a solid foundation of lab techniques and even someone who knows how to repair and maintain equipment if not someone who can build stuff and you got yourself a pretty formidable lab. In terms of labor it's not like one reliable person can't do the work undergraduates do.

I remeber back in my university lab days I had to show a graduate student how to boil water. There are so many incompetent people in academia.

I hope you are memeing about the boiling thing.
A monkey could probably learn to comfortably do that.

I'm just going to have to fund my own research. Now one is going to give a shit until it is too late.

I'm dead serious. I was hired (microbiology undergraduate at the time) on to the lab to more or less maintain their lab while they were gone for a research trip in the summer. They had nobody with too much soild media experience or even media preparation for that matter so one of the graduate students wanted me to show her how to prepare plates and as I was showing her through the steps and got to the part where we had to boil the media she kept over boiling it. I think we went through 4 batches before she finally admitted she had no idea how to boil stuff. And from that point on I just did what I was hired on to do, stayed for the summer and fucked right off because I wasn't going to be dealing with that level of incompetent for any length of time with actual experiments.

At least in my experience there may be alot of quote on quote "smart" students, graduate and undergraduate but many of them lack any real world experience that translates into lab technical expertise.

There are alot of stories I have similar to that and I could go on and on on why I ended up not presuing an acedemic career in the university.

Although this was with mainly biology majors I've seen it with other fields. There are some brilliant ones who will end up where they want to be but there are so many idiots as well.

>> not under someone else
user, even in the unlikely event you become a professor you will still be working for someone else. The cock and cunt sucking never ends.

Which field? maths, Physics, Biology are all very different in terms of infrastructure required and background knowledge required.

No bully here. I did a PhD in Physics so I have an idea what is required. And that is a LOT of work. Mind you what you seek is not impossible but the enormity of the task is not to be underestimated.

Also universities are not just a place of learning, these are also a place of networking, to meet likeminded people to interact with and learn of new ideas, developments and takes on all kinds of issues.

Are you a billionaire? If not, forget about it.
Research is a normal job. No one is gonna do it if he has to earn money some other way, because other work will consume his time.

Sure you can, this guy has a degree in chem engineering but he instead solves problems in theoretical computer science by merely tackling open problems nobody is working on news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346697

What you need to be able to do is obtain the latest research in journals for whatever field you're working on, and be able to understand them. If you can do that then you can set up your crazy man lab, lot's of classes exist to teach undergrad's how to change their studies into research. For example, here's some lecture slides that explain how to present and do professional mathematics cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/toolkit13/how-to-do-math-and-tcs.pdf it's written for theoretical compsci but applies to any field since it's math.

One example is CRISPR, you can definitely have a garage lab that edits genes using CRISPR as it's such a cheap method. In fact a ton of backyard biology labs exist often written in 2600 and other hacker journals how to set up your own DNA/gene lab.

Thanks guys, I don't want to quote everyone but I really appreciate all of your (You)s.
From your replies then:
-Garage physics is impossible.
-Garage bio and chem are doable but depend on project complexity and idiots (CRISPR saves.)
-Garage math and computer science are the easiest to set-up.
-Networking is key.
-The poor need not apply.

My field is biology but I was thinking something like The White Diamond (2004) in OP. It's a documentary about an aeronautic engineer who goes to Guyana to build an airship to fly over the forest canopies of Guyana and document biodiversity.