Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm struggling to see how somebody on their own could come up with a non-trivial scientific result that was meaningful in any way. Richard Feynman at 67, partaking in an inquiry into the space shuttle challenger disaster, dunked some pieces of rubber, taken from a model of the challenger, in ice cold water and observed that they lacked springiness. The full story is fascinating. Other simple, non-rigorous experimen…
Um, feynman was a professional physicist who worked on billion dollar projects. For the o-ring, he (and NASA, and Morton Thiokol already knew the behavior of o-rings in cold weather, and it was engineering, not science. He would call what wolverine above is describing as similar to cargo cult science.
But regarding the first two as being “real science” and claiming authority on where Feynman’s comments about cargo cult science would be directed? You must acknowledge the hypocritical stance you’ve taken.
You’ve co-mingled the initial statements that Wolverine made with your disdain for people who write hackaday articles and are written up in the media. You’ve introduced that notion and then derided human curiosity and informal experiments as being “not science” or being “engineering” (and somehow mutually exclusive from science) or “citizen science”.
All of these different ways to deride something that you introduced to the conversation - the perils of bad science journalism.
You’ve stated
“ I've worked in citizen science and I have even done some exciting stuff in my garage, which attracted the world's leading researcher in my area of interest. The first thing I'd need to do with my tech is to bring it to his lab and…”
That’s where you’ve made your off-by-one error. You’ve said “the first thing I’d need to do” when you meant “the next thing I’d need to do” — as if the Real Science had not already begun.
“Real Science” starts a lot sooner than you claim.