Research without university degree

[Ahsan Khan]

Hi All,
After four years of hard working in university campus during the course of mechanical engineering, i have had a very painful and unjust punishment instead of any reward. The details are long, precisely I will say i have studied four years in university, mean while a lecturer unfairly punished me under unfair means during the exam, and the university committee debar me for 2 years i because, was just and did not cheat in exam, sue university in High court, but after a period of about one year( when i write all exams of engineering) the court ordered not to interfere in the matter. I now have no degree. I am supposed to be a good students among the professors and students of the department. I have also Qualified a national exam- GATE ( Graduate aptitude Test in Engineering) conducted for admission to master in engineering (M.tech), but as i have no degree i can get the admission nor can i get any government job. Presently i am working as a physics Teacher in private institute where i teach physics to engineering aspirants, preparing to get admission in IITs( Indian Institutes of Technology). It feels to me as if I were born to do some research in electrodynamics. Can this be possible to do without the degree?
Any help will be highly appreciated. REGARDS

 

[chiro]

Hey ovais.

The big issue I see with you is one of credibility. Unfortunately to be taken seriously in research, you usually need an academic track record, which has a bit of a dent in it. You can overcome this, but you will need to be aware of these kinds of things.

Having said that what kind of research do you want to do? Does the research require a lot of resources like equipment? Do you need tens of thousands of dollars of equipment plus funding or is the experiment cheap? Do you need custom created materials?

In terms of doing the research I can't see why not. I do research in my time off, but its definitely not something that I pursue as a full-time endeavor.

Maybe you could give us an idea of what kind research you want to do. If you want to do research that doesn't cost a lot of money, or need a lot of resources (like other people and equipment), that would be a lot more realistic in your situation. This is the case for me, the only things I need are a few programs (statistical packages, and programming packages), pen and paper and access to the internet and textbooks.

 

[Ahsan Khan]

I want to do research in Michael Faraday's work, it is said that the mystery of universe lies in the four equations given him. The ways magnetism, electricity, optics are united, this unification appeals me as if the universe is all relative, and want to inquire may be there would some relation between faradays work and Einstein theory of relativity. I have no idea about the expenditure and laboratories i need to work in. Could u please give me any suggestion that can fulfill my desire.

 

[chiro]

I'm sorry I can't give any advice in that regard. I do personal research in areas of statistics, computer science, and mathematics and for this research I only need pen and paper, a computer with the right tools, and access to resources like textbooks and perhaps information like other research documents like articles. I don't need access to expensive equipment that can be involved in research in physics, chemistry and so on.

My advice to you is to think about something specific that you want to test. The scope of your research sounds extremely broad and its really hard to make sense of something that broad without doing a few specific things first.

All of your areas that you mentioned which include magnetism, electricity, and optics are all really large fields and have a lot of subspecialties. In electricity alone there are a few different viewpoints and formulations out there: some that come to mind is Konstantin Meyl and B. Lehnert who are (or were) both professors in their respective fields.

Some areas of research might be concerned with developing simulations and seeing how good the results are, but my advice to you is to start with research that is very specific and small in scope and then slowly build up on that so that you can connected more things together.

Also how is your math? How much math have you been exposed to in terms of 20th and 21st century math? You might find that some generalizations of cutting edge math give insights to new ways of thinking about things. Mathematics allows humans a way to make sense of things that we can not do with our other normal senses. For example it is easy to describe properties of things that have a dozen dimensions, and even work with things that are infinite-dimensional. We can also work with things that are completely paradoxical like the concept of infinity and how that relates to a wide range of phenomena.

I can't really give you more advice, and you should know that there are a lot of people out there that want to do the same thing as you and some in their later years have said that they probably won't understand the whole thing as they anticipated (Stephen Hawking said this in different words), so you should be aware that you probably won't figure it all out and you also need to be aware that this is perfectly normal.

 

[Ahsan Khan]

Thanks Chiro, you view that I should start with something very specific in my approach. Well yes, these physics field has fascinated and a lot of people are working on similar topics. With aid of mathematics starting with some specific make great sense.

 

[Mépris]

You're probably just twenty years old, which is quite young. Have you considered going back to school and getting a degree in Physics this time?