You never know. Doug Forcett made an almost perfectly accurate guess as to the inner workings of the afterlife while stoned.

For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it.

Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.

Think of it like this: how many degree-level lectures can you give in physics as compared to whatever your profession is? Now imagine what someone who knows as much about your profession as you do about physics sounds like to you.

Half my questions on Physics stackexchange are so naïve they’re not even wrong, they are so bad they get closed as nonsensical. Looking at past exam papers, I could probably get a grade B in A-level physics (A-level is UK qualification taken at age 18 between secondary school and university currently used to decide which university you go to).

The other half of my ideas are right, but actual physicists tell me they’re “obvious” and “not worth writing about”.

The fact that pretty much all thoughts from people outside the field are either obvious, false, or nonsensical... doesn't invalidate the idea that flashes of insight can come from anywhere. I get what you're saying and agree the odds of it happening are pretty much zero. But sometimes even things with a probability of pretty much 0 can happen. The eigenvalue thing is an example of that, in my opinion.

A layperson could unwittingly trigger a cognitive leap by asking naive questions. A la Feynman saying he can't explain magnetism in a way that I could understand it, the effort could spark an insight or novel angle.

Name a single instance of a lay person without a background in physics discovering the basis behind a phenomenon since 1900.

For some reason, physics seems to be disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.

> disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.

I’ve heard this before, but I wonder how true it is? I know my experiences are just anecdotes, but I knew a guy who was convinced the Hotel Room/Bellboy/Missing Dollar problem “broke maths”, and I’ve had countless frustrations with family members promoting homeopathy and acquaintances talking about chemical X being “one atom away from being bleach” like that doesn’t apply to water.

I’d be interested if anyone has done a real analysis of rates of armchair nonsense by sector.

Weren't (some)new super conductors discovered by just trying a bunch of crap already on the shelves in the labs once the concept existed?

Anyway, I just thought every device we make to measure something, there's some event the blows the scales. So what if you really just make shit up where does that go?

I like the other commenter defending the post about Cthulhu, It's just as made up as what I posted. Perspective is healthy.

I think people don't like your post because your example is from fiction and is therefore not insightful as to whether or not layman speculation can provide value.

The eigenvalues and eigenvectors example is in there now, and that one is not fiction. It's also really cool.

Physicists providing an insight into math is absolutely not what I was talking about - I was talking about lay people providing an insight into theoretical physics.

To suggest that theoretical physicists are lay people with respect to math is silly. Also, I don't understand what you mean by a "connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors" as the two seem quite obviously connected a priori?

I understand that, and understand this likely falls into the unfalsifiable category, but when everyone, even physicists, are grasping at straws, laypeople don't have many options other than to throw around random "what if" ideas. It's fun.

I doubt that hypothesis is actually true, and it may never be testable, but it's also true that a lot of things believed to be untestable eventually do become testable.

It can be a bit exhausting when online physics forums get crowded by people who clearly have no understanding of physics asking for an explanation of whether their "pet theory" makes sense.

I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.

I can definitely understand that. I wouldn't post such ignorant armchair speculation on a physics forum. But on HN? Why not?

Meta-physics is inscrutable (unless something leaves the realm of meta-physics). What's the harm in speculating about it? Like the simulation hypothesis, for example.

I understand it touches on real things here, like dark energy, but it's just dumb fun to try to conceive of if anything could lie beyond the universe and what it could possibly be if there is anything. It's likely forever unfalsifiable, but in some sense that's what makes it a fair subject for laymen. If it were testable, then you have to leave it to the professionals.

I know I have zero understanding of physics. I don't have any attachment to this or any other speculation. I'm not a crank or something. But it's impossible to not wonder about the nature of reality and the formation of the universe, you know? The fact that it's unknowable within our lifetimes, and probably forever, is the driving factor.

I like seeing how real physicists answer this question, too, in interviews and podcasts. They always hedge it with "of course this is wild speculation", like everyone should. I see I didn't really hedge my initial post, which was a mistake. This was a random thought triggered by that other post, not something I actually believe whatsoever.

and - the nilometers have just been fired up.