The Galileo Shortcut: "How do people accept my "out there" idea and revolutionize the world before I get grey hairs, a second-hand car, and a so-so job?"

Short answer: Truly open source your idea (even so-called "open" pre-print servers these days are "religiously" enshrined). Embody your idea in a working device with novel behaviour, effects, functions, etc made feasible/possible by your idea. Good recent example of idea? (no device in this one) Google [ "Surfer dude" stuns physicists "theory of everything" ]. However, that's the tail end. Here's the tough part (as the article/post alludes):

First, if you really think you're onto something that's going to change the world, (at least for The Galileo Shortcut) you've two massive steps to take. Personally, over the centuries and especially in the 20th and early 21st, where the idea translates into a working device, I've met or read about not even a handful of folks capable of either, let alone both steps together. But there you go, maybe you're different. And the times ARE a'changing.

First consideration:

Check your ego at the door. That means two things in 'The Galileo Shortcut.' (1): Remember and reflect on these echoes:

"..the thing that's unusual about good scientists is that while they're doing whatever they're doing, they're not so sure of themselves as others usually are. They can live with steady doubt, think "maybe it's so" and act on that, all the time knowing it's only "maybe;" - Richard Feynman

"NATURE ISN'T CLASSICAL, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better MAKE IT QUANTUM MECHANICAL, and by golly it's a wonderful problem because it doesn't look easy." - Richard Feynman (1981)"

"Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation....Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynmann, 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out' (Perseus Books, New York,1999), pp. 186-187

-- and from John von Neumann:

"A state of being is an experience. A description of a state of being is a symbol. Symbols and experiences do not follow the same rules." In 1936, Von Neumann, along with Garrett Birkhoff, published a paper that, in laying the grounds for quantum logic stated this more formally. The rules that symbols follow they called classical logic. The rules experience follows they called quantum logic.

(2) Forget acclaim and 'reputation' as the prize. If it works as you thik it'll be world changing (remember, it's a "Galileo Idea"). If it's one of those, the need for acclaim will cost you. Big time. In the deep end of 'The Galileo Shortcut' the fastest way home disdains the "I" did it (myself, principally, etc). If you're at the heart of this effort (whatever it is), in this age people will come to know, even if your "name" doesn't go up in lights (or Nobels). It doesn't hurt though to make and photocopy your notes, and photograph your set-ups. And back them up everywhere.

Second consideration (another biggy):

Disdain commercial gain. Maybe you think it's the only good idea you're ever going to have in your life, or feed your family with, or get you into the limelight. Trust otherwise. And let this one go. With love. The number of folks (dead and alive) who have protected and secreted their ideas while they thought and fought a way to protect their academic bragging and commercial interests is legion (The ideas, mostly the "civilisation changing" ones, are still protected and secreted, and we don't know squat (almost) about most of them).

More so the heartache, relationships, years, and dough folks spend doing so. "What are you saying, you disconnected from reality poster (me)??" the "common sense" part of you is, perhaps, crying!! Think 'Open Source.' Or 'Open Mind.' You'll become a hero (if it works). And then you'll have other and different problems.

The most powerful shortcut is to build a working device that depends on and demonstrates your idea in practice. If it's practically useful, or at least fun (remember the "laser" and all those years it was a solution in search of a problem wandering in the wilderness?) all the better.

I know, a 'small' version of this is called an "experiment," but if you want a "shortcut" (attention, acceptance, dare I say, acclaim - look at Linus (I know, Linux is "just" software)), there's nothing like open source demo-ing your "heavier-than-air 'aircraft' " to folks who are ready to lay down their (professional) lives (...and yours) for a law of nature (that "heavier than air aircraft can't fly"). Closed source demoing of a 'civilisation-changing' idea, and it works? Then we never hear of you, and probably not the idea.

Like the successful have done: Think Big, Start small. Scale smart. Strangely, this works for theories too. It is throwing off the linguistic, mental and cultural prison paradigms, blinders, and filters that's the tough part. Like S. Faiz Khan wrote: "A paradigm is what you think about something before you start thinking about it." Yep, regular education can be handcuffing. As Will Roger's said: "You know too much of what ain't so!"

(Tip: a shortcut on the thinking part of the shortcut? Meditation, which is not the same as meditating. Huh? check out 'The Path Is The Goal' by Chogyam Trungpa - two millennia of high-tech can-do and experiment resulting in and distilled into high-touch functioning and experiential evidence. Or, if he's too 'brutal' for your path, and if you want to start from the outside in, take a look at: www.normandoidge.com - and what that immediately implies for you.)

If your idea needs "a fortune" to construct and demo that what you claim is "so" [no 'gotchas' please, like so many (not quite all) 'forever' machines ('zero-point' energy devices excepted from this discussion)], or years of manufacturing R&D, well, either get deeply creative (easier than you think once you start imagining and start tapping the Net and other 'Galileos' in other fields, especially in other countries), and get "fortunate", or give it up and try the traditional route.

Basically, if your idea is "so" (or so you 'feel', 'think' etc), then you ought to be able to do something demonstrable with it in the here and now. And if you're intelligent about that, including the ego, paradigm, and commerce parts, you'll be stunned at what's possible in collaborations where it doesn't have to be about you or what you already 'know can't be'.

Caveat emptor. Don't be naive. If your idea is "so", and moreso if your "so" realizes a working device, if it is 'world changing' and therefore necessarily destabilizing in present civilization, you'll encounter robust, if not, occasionally, terminal suppression efforts by various gatekeepers.

Paranoia? Healthy. Necessary. And a sign of sanity. When one company makes $10 billion in profit (after all costs) every 90 days when oil costs half of what it does today (look it up, it's public knowledge!), a large scale "solution" (an energy "Galileo Idea" [&device] that works for a fraction of the cost - and that would "change the world") will not be welcomed by the powers that be. It will be actively resisted, sabotaged, suppressed, submerged, etc. Do the arithmetic. Think of the lifestyles. And interests still larger. You get the idea.

Consider, in an age of exponential discovery (ours), empires of 'old' (of all stripes) persist either because there are no new discoveries (fabulously untrue); no discoveries that don't disturb the status quo of special interests (of whatever ilk) (also fabulously untrue); or there are no discoveries that would upset the status quo that are (to the best of efforts) permitted to disturb the status quo (strange, that notion works in my physics department too!).

Closer to your supermarket shelves, the modern pharmaceutical industry is, commercially, built on well-engineered transitory palliatives ('feel betters') - and the regular recovery of their development costs and investment profits - and not on permanent cures. Commercially, a one-time, permanent cure is uninviting commercial suicide, as well as grant, institutional, Federal agency, and academic career path destruction. Until ground-truths change game truths rule. Ask around.