How do/did scientists, especially theoretical physicists, publish papers whenever they wanted to?

Question

is theoretical research different from regular research? like are they not required to get an institution (a uni or a research center) to back them?

i’ve also read similar things about papers in the field of math and i think chemistry too about historical figures publishing while working unrelated jobs

In: Physics

Answer 1

Neither theoretical nor experimental research inherently requires an institution to “legitimize” research for publication; good research well presented can stand on its own.

However, there are two major reasons why most research gets done at institutions rather than getting done by folks working unrelated jobs.

**TIME** – A person working full-time at an institution as a professional-researcher has the privilege of being able to devote their working-hours toward research. Sure, a big chunk of their workday may be required to handle various other duties too (like teaching a course, etc.) but they’re still better off (in terms of numbers of hours they’re able to devote to research) than a person working an unrelated full-time who can only work on their research in their personal time.

**MONEY** – Institutions are very useful for sharing resources. Libraries, academic journal subscriptions, particle accelerators, etc. are all things that would be extremely expensive for one person to self-fund, but split the costs over tens or hundreds of institution members who intend to use it and the per-capita price tag becomes much less prohibitive.

So, in general that means that institution-based professional-researchers will have a strong edge over hobby-researchers doing work on their own time and their own dime. That being said, “theoretical” research typically requires less infrastructure than cutting edge “experimental” research – so a theoretical hobby-researcher has a much better chance of doing new and interesting work at their home desk compared to an experimental hobby-researcher trying to do high-tech stuff in their garage; they’re both at a time disadvantage compared to the professional-researchers… but the theorist only needs a library (or a virtually pirated one) whereas an experimentalist will have a much more difficult task of trying to do cutting-edge stuff without cutting-edge equipment (kind impossible to just pirate a Large Hadron Collider or something even if you had a 3D printer).