Breakthrough basic research is research that discovers something about how the world works that was essentially impossible to imagine. It opens up vast horizons for additional exploration. Breakthrough basic research also is research that discovers how to measure something to an accuracy far beyond current methods. Being able to make a measurement you couldn’t make before also opens up vast horizons for further exploration. Notice however, that these two conceptions of breakthrough basic research are, in fact, the same thing. Discovering something new about how the world works is, in its essence, developing the ability to make a measurement that used to be impossible. The value that can be returned by discoveries like these can be absolutely enormous. Imagine what the current dollar value of Newton’s Laws of Motion is. It must be immense. Imagine again the current dollar value of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Also very large. We can characterize discoveries produced through breakthrough basic research as those that not only tell us something we couldn’t make ourselves imagine, but also as those that are seriously consequential to the world we live in. They give us abilities we didn’t have before. They make us into a new technological species. They allow us to survive better than those who came before us.

If, as an individual, you’re looking to make an investment, then there is nothing that pays off like breakthrough basic research. One of its deficiencies, however, is that there are few investments that are worse. The returns are absolutely spectacular, but are also extremely rare. Rare enough that high investment costs will make the expected value of any return completely unable to cover those costs. For an individual investor, breakthrough basic research is less like an investment, and more like the purchasing of an extremely expensive lottery ticket. But even so, there is another exacerbating deficiency: The loss of control. Should you beat the odds and discover something, it will almost certainly be a new way to look at the world. Protecting such a discovery, such that you would have the exclusive ability to exploit it, would be extremely difficult. Once the idea is “out there,” you’ve lost control of it and whoever can understand it can exploit it. So much so, that the ultimate benefactor of your research is going to be the population at large and those incumbents who might create products using your discovery. You would have taken the risks of investing, but others can, and likely will, reap the rewards. The longer it takes and the more effort it takes to exploit your discovery, the more likely you are to lose control of it.

If you’re an individual and you wish to invest in breakthrough basic research, it would be illogical to invest without first mitigating these deficiencies. If you don’t have effective mitigations in place, you’re gambling, not investing. So you have to ask yourself what your mitigation options are. One option is to eliminate the “individual” part of the equation. Since the return on this kind of investment can be huge and that value is ultimately distributed to the population at large, it can make economic sense for the population to make the investment. In our time, investment by the population means investment by the government. If the amount invested by the government is large, but the probability of return is not too small, then the expected value of the return might be large enough to cover the investment costs and satisfy the government and its people.

Unfortunately, even in this case, the expected value of the return is unlikely to be large enough because the probabilities associated with breakthrough basic research can be quite small. This deficiency can be mitigated by making a large number of investments in relatively independent lines of research. A strategy that can work if one of the lines of research succeeds and manages to pay for all other lines of research. It works wonderfully well if the successful research also returns massive value to the population at large. But you still have the problem of the loss of control deficiency. Should the government succeed and actually discover something, it might need to protect that discovery until it can be exploited. Obviously, secrecy is required for military discoveries. However, for other discoveries, returning value to the population at large would actually be facilitated by the complete and early dissemination of the research results. Therefore, eliminating the “individual” by using government investment allows us to deal with important deficiencies in breakthrough basic research and convert something that is a natural lottery into a rational investment.

Another strategy that can deal with the deficiencies of individual investing in breakthrough basic research, is to invest for philanthropic reasons. If you are a very wealthy individual and a philanthropist, and your intent is to benefit the population at large through your investments, then your investment in breakthrough basic research can return a huge multiple of the value of your investment. We can all certainly understand the allure of such a strategy. Should it pay off, your investment in breakthrough basic research will prove itself to be much more efficient than any other investment instrument—if you can deal with the deficiencies. Your best option would still be to follow the government strategy of engaging many different independent researchers in the hope that one line of research would pay off spectacularly. That would address the probability deficiency. You’d likely take the same position as the government on the loss of control deficiency and permit the free dissemination of the research results. So a philanthropic individual can invest on behalf of the population and that investment would be as rational as philanthropy is.

But maybe philanthropic altruism is not rational. At least, not in a materialistic sense. If we decide that philanthropists are receiving something of more immediate value from their philanthropy, we need to decide what that thing is and what its value might be. There is, of course, the “pat on the back” and that can have value even if you’re the one patting yourself on the back. And that might be enough if you valued those pats on the back in some kind of extraordinary way. And that’s the crux of the matter. Very few people on the planet would place some kind of extraordinary value on a pat on the back. The valuation is entirely subjective. And such a valuation is, most likely, a delusion.

Another thing that a philanthropist could get is a sense of permanence. The Earth is billions of years old. The human species is millions of years old. Our civilization is thousands of years old. But each of us is lucky to live a hundred years, and no one knows how many billions of years are spread out before us. Breakthrough discoveries in basic research, discoveries that tell us how the world works, have the ability to persist for as long as reality persists. If you were to fund a discovery with enough significance, you could force yourself into world history and into the history of science. Then, for as long as that research is put to use, you’ve made yourself a part of that use, and a continuing part of history. A philanthropist could certainly assign a very large value to that future notoriety and the sense of permanence it provides. But we must ask ourselves, “What value was it to Newton in his time for us to have his name on our lips in our time?” None, right?

For the philanthropist to actually enjoy the future value that he creates, he’d have to somehow place himself in that future. He’d have to be alive somehow and receiving value from that discovery in that future. The only way that is possible is if the philanthropist is, in some sense, the discovery itself. The idea. The concept. If you think of yourself as a bundle of concepts all working together to move what we call “you” through the world, then “you” are the continuation of the existence of those who first discovered each of the concepts in that bundle. Newton lives in you through his laws of motion. You animate those laws. Aristotle lives through you, too. The person who first had the idea that fire could be controlled, that person lives through his idea, which is also animated by you. And when you discover something new about the world and add that concept to the bundle that is “you,” you’ve created a new person who will live though that concept as it is animated by those who use it throughout all time. Through that discovery you’ll have a form of “everlasting life.” If you then assign a value to this kind of existence, to this kind of permanence, depending on the value you assign, breakthrough research can be a rational investment for an individual. Even with this rationale, the value you receive today and the value the “you” of the future receives are both completely subjective. Is imagining yourself in some future, in this way, a means to enjoy the fruits of your labor, or is it simply delusional? Probably delusional.

Another way to deal with the deficiencies of individual investing in breakthrough basic research is to question your individuality. If the entire concept of individuality is somehow a delusion, and we are all acting as a part of a collective, and our actions are forced to a greater or lesser degree, then the collective is deciding to invest by using individuals who have little or no choice in the matter. You are investing in breakthrough basic research because you are being sacrificed by the collective for its benefit. But even if this is true, you may still be able to act to remediate the deficiencies in this kind of research.

Yet another way to deal with the deficiencies of individual investing in breakthrough basic research is to drive the cost of doing the research down to zero. If you’ve invested nothing, then the expected value of your return, even if zero, will cover your costs. Once that’s true, then every deficiency that leads to the research not paying off could not threaten to fail to recover your zero value investment. There are a number of ways that your costs could be zero. Someone could simply give you their discovery. They may lose what they’ve invested, but you can’t. Or, you could simply stumble upon a discovery. In either case, you could move on from the discovery process to the process of developing and exploiting it, but that is a separate investment with its own, and presumably much better, chance of being paid back by the expected value of your return. Everything is upside for your zero value investment because you know you have a breakthrough discovery. Even if something goes wrong and you fail to keep your discovery secret so that the rewards then go to others, you’ve still not lost on your original investment.

Being given a breakthrough discovery or stumbling upon one has no real downside. But let’s say you do something that’s just slightly worse than that. Let’s say you pay someone a nominal fee to purchase, or expend a small effort and hit upon, a breakthrough discovery. Your expense associated with obtaining the discovery is therefore bounded. It is the unbounded expense of doing the research in conjunction with the very low chances of success that makes individual investing in breakthrough research such an irrational thing to do. However, once the cost of discovery has a bound, that deficiency has been mitigated.

We’re all pretty familiar with these approaches to, and views of, investing in breakthrough basic research. In fact, they all work together. An individual researcher is investing his/her career and life in breakthrough basic research. Governments and philanthropists can reduce that burden by funding his or her lifestyle. Nevertheless, these researchers are objectively playing the lottery with their lives. A philanthropist should be able to look through his delusions and know that his investment is really a lottery ticket. He might take actions to make the game he’s playing a less extreme lottery, but he can’t change its fundamental nature. A government is the only kind of player that can be said to be making a reasoned, prudent investment. But governments must employ individual researchers, who are ultimately individual investors, who are not really investors, but players in the most extreme of lotteries, who have staked their lives, their wealth, and that of their families on the outcome. The foolishness of this act cannot be overstated.

Even though individual researchers know that they are losers in the breakthrough basic research game, they willingly continue to play it. Each one takes the bet he or she will be the one who discovers some consequential, breakthrough understanding of something basic about the world. Those who falsely think they are investing can justify their actions in all of the ways I’ve described above, but ultimately each one winds up making some highly subjective valuation while insisting on its objectivity. Some will claim that they have no choice but to do the research, but they are still losers in the game. But there will be others who will understand that the only reason to play a lottery is for entertainment purposes and that they do the research only to entertain themselves. But they might still be losers in the breakthrough basic research game, because the objective monetary value of that entertainment can’t buy much. And that means it can’t buy any substantial research. If the entertainment buys more than a stumble, then it is very likely being overvalued.

Playing a lottery as if it were an investment is a delusion. However, telling yourself that you are playing the lottery with your life and the lives of your family members, is hard. It is also a hard thing to admit to others. You have to admit that you’re almost certainly wasting your life. You’re throwing it all away. For nothing. If you can’t bring yourself to the point where you can say this to yourself, and if people who do what you do can’t say this to themselves, and if there is a community of you that can’t speak these words to themselves, and you individually and as a group try to make what you do appear to be a rational investment, then you will destroy the ability of governments to exploit you to make breakthrough basic research into a rational investment, because you will have stopped doing breakthrough basic research. It’s not necessarily obvious why this must be true: You won’t take the risks necessary to make a breakthrough because you’ve deluded yourself into believing you actually have a chance to make that breakthrough. Every rational person who plays a lottery knows that someone will win, but they must act as if it will not be them. They tell themselves that they might win only for entertainment purposes. An investor believes he might actually win, acts accordingly, and thereby kills the audacity required to be successful at breakthrough basic research.

You may disagree with this analysis. You’re a researcher and you see yourself working to achieve a breakthrough in basic research and you’re making prudent investment decisions about what to do with your time and resources. “Besides,” you might say, “how can I be passionate about something I’ve decided I’m going to fail at?” Well, you don’t need to be passionate, you just need to do the research. But if passion is what you want, remember that people play the lottery all the time with great passion. Those who do, either don’t realize they’ll never win, or they purposely tell themselves that they can win even though they “know” they never will. They knowingly delude themselves for entertainment, but they don’t act on that delusion. They don’t bet their houses. Someone who believes that he might really be able to make the next breakthrough in basic research and has invested heavily in that idea, has bet his house and more. I’m here to tell you that you’ll never be the next Einstein, or more modestly, some fraction of the man. It’s a delusion. But more importantly, I’m here to tell you that you’ll never be the next Newton. But if you want to do breakthrough basic research, you should entertain yourself with the idea you’ll be Newton times ten. Then take steps to enjoy that idea.

How does an individual do breakthrough basic research? From our discussion above, he must minimize the costs associated with his research: In the best case, he should try (as his Newton times ten persona) and hopefully succeed at stumbling upon a breakthrough. Such a strategy would greatly limit his investment cost. But how does a researcher decrease the cost of stumbling upon the next great idea candidate and increase the probability that the next candidate will be a breakthrough? Wouldn’t it appear to others that the researcher was just stumbling through their research life? Unless he had some method guiding his stumbles (and would it be a stumble if he did?), then stumbling through his research life is his best strategy. Of course, the other way to do breakthrough basic research is to obtain the breakthrough from someone else. You don’t have to make the investment if you can recognize someone else’s stumble, their next great idea candidate, and make it into a breakthrough. You could purchase the idea, join with them, take the idea if it is public, or steal it if it is not.

The problem, of course, is that you have to compare the probability that you will stumble upon a breakthrough by yourself to the probability that considering the stumbles of others will lead to a breakthrough. Once you realize that considering the stumbles of others is a way for you to approximate what the government does when investing in multiple independent lines of research, logic must tell you that considering the ideas of others is much more likely to be fruitful than coming up with something entirely on your own. Breakthrough basic research is still a lottery. It’s still illogical to play it, but your odds of winning go up by 100% in a lottery if you play two tickets instead of one. So the question you’d have to answer is, “How many illogical tickets are you willing to play?” Which is equivalent to asking, “How many ridiculous ideas are you willing to consider in your search for that breakthrough idea?” However, since doing breakthrough basic research is illogical on its face, why then would you use logic to determine whether you should consider someone’s crazy idea? Equivalently, how many five dollar tickets should you purchase in the lottery? The answer is that you should spend exactly the amount of money that provides you the maximum entertainment value. No more. In breakthrough basic research, you shouldn’t use logic to determine which ideas you should consider. You should use entertainment value as the determinant. Who knows, you might have a breakthrough while you’re enjoying yourself. Well, someone might, even if it will never be you.

But maybe you’re not doing breakthrough basic research. Maybe you’re doing downstream research and are leaving breakthrough basic research to others. You’re not the kind who would do something that, on its face, is so illogical. You’re okay with making downstream discoveries. They can be more of an investment. Some are still lotteries, others are close to being lotteries, but you can move down the risk scale and choose those where the probabilities of success are high enough that they can be proper investments. And if you’re asking me what’s wrong with that, my answer is, “Nothing. But if everyone does what you’re doing, who’s going to do the breakthrough basic research?” And you respond, “But I am doing breakthrough research.” And it’s true, you may be doing breakthrough downstream research. When someone makes a discovery through breakthrough basic research, that discovery opens up a vast horizon for downstream research and discovery. When the field is young and little is known, there could be breakthrough after breakthrough. But it’s all downstream. The horizons that are opened up, are attributable to the breakthrough basic research. It’s surely true, at the moment of the original breakthrough, we couldn’t map those horizons, but our ability to conceive of them would not be in doubt. As the field matures, the magnitude of any breakthrough would tend to be lessened, but they could still be highly consequential. You could have tremendous success and return significant value to everyone involved. But that value is attributable to the original discovery from the breakthrough basic research.

You don’t have to be involved in breakthrough basic research. However, we should expect that progress in science will slow down and possibly stop. Some have suggested this has already occurred in multiple fields of scientific endeavor. I must agree, and my argument is that misunderstanding what breakthrough basic research actually is, has caused us, as a society, to require that it pay off for not just governments, but for individual researchers, and it simply can’t. It’s a lottery and you can’t insist that a lottery return winnings to each player or even a small fraction of them. If you do, you change the game and wind up with most researchers seeking immediate return on their “investments” in breakthrough basic research. Let’s say you’ve made the investment of obtaining an education in the field, a job in the field, or building a reputation among your colleagues. Once you’ve made that investment, you have a lot to lose. You want some return on your investment and either you or those supporting you might want to see progress toward generating that return. That progress can be an improving reputation in the community, a published paper, attending a conference, and any number of other indicators that a breakthrough could be coming. Eventually, you could all settle on indicators of progress and give up on an actual breakthrough. The indicators of progress become the highly subjective, massively overvalued, return on investment. Yet, your best chance of having a breakthrough in basic research is putting together a mechanism where you can create many ridiculous ideas and bathe yourself in the ridiculous ideas of others in the hope that you’d put something new together. As you might imagine, your indicators of progress would go to zero, and those supporting you might have a real problem with you. But you’d take those ridiculous ideas, look at your field of research as a two-dimensional world, then use those ideas to determine that there was a third dimension, then move orthogonally to access it.

But even that process can be broken by the investment delusion. When we look to immerse ourselves in the ridiculous ideas of others for our own entertainment, we might decide that the greatest probability is that the best ideas will come from people like us who have the same or similar training. I mean, there are potentially thousands and even millions of ideas out there to be considered and you can’t in the lottery sense, “play” them all. So what heuristics should you use? What algorithm should you use to choose the numbers on your lottery ticket? For a real lottery, we know the numbers will be random. That won’t be true for the breakthrough basic research lottery. We don’t know what kinds of ideas are most likely to pay off, but if we are looking for ideas that break out of the dimension they are in, then we need to select ideas from people who we think can, or who have proven they can, break the dimensional thinking in some field of endeavor. Finding this ability in a person makes it worth considering that person’s ideas, and that act is equivalent to selecting the numbers on your lottery ticket and making your bet. Note that we’re not making an investment decision, we’re trying to improve our odds in what we believe to be a non-random lottery.

We all know breakthrough basic researchers from the past like Einstein and Newton. And we can be lulled into believing that we’ll need someone like one of those gentlemen to provide us with the next breakthrough in basic research. But their qualifications in their fields and their ability to think orthogonally are two different abilities. The presence of those two abilities in a single individual is rare. Insisting that researchers have those two abilities erects a barrier to success that is completely unnecessary. I propose that individual researchers remove that requirement and seek out ideas from orthogonal thinkers from other areas of life. Not from those who research in their area or even in related areas. Those who research in completely unrelated areas. Those who don’t research at all in the way we think of research, because it is the orthogonal thinking that is important. Critically, if a researcher has already successfully shown this ability in other fields and has moved into your field, then you should run, not walk, to their aid. You’d be acting in your best entertainment interest as a player in the most wonderful lottery ever.

A chance mutation in the genetic code of a cell could confer upon it abilities that make it a new species. It could make those cells that possess that mutation survive better than those that came before. And it’s only the consequential mutations that matter. And those who win, win at the lottery of evolution, the most wonderful lottery ever. When I’m researching, I’m actually trying to win at the lottery of evolution, but I’m also entertaining myself in this game I’ve chosen to play, with the very, very, very, great likelihood that I’m never going to have that breakthrough, that idea that mutates me into another person, but that you might.

I figured out what life is thirty plus years ago. I’m writing a multi-chaptered paper/book on the subject now. I made a post on ResearchGate last year where I posted the introduction and part of chapter 1. I described my thinking on what is going on in the origin of life field and why I think researchers might be interested in my solution. I made two references to my prior work that I think showed that I was an orthogonal thinker and had come up with solutions that represented breakthrough basic research in both cases. It is not my intent to make my origin of life research public. However, I would like to validate it and to pursue proof of concept by attempting to create life from non-life in a laboratory setting. So far, I’ve found no takers. I appreciate that I have a conflict of interest with those who are currently researching in this field. So my plan is to have someone who is not directly pursuing origin of life research validate my idea and to use their opinion and reputation to move this research forward. I think my basic problem with people being willing to consider my idea is the investment problem I’ve detailed here. The other major problem is that most researchers are tied to organizations that are using the government or philanthropic model of investing widely in many lines of independent research and publishing the results widely. I, on the other hand, have already stumbled upon the discovery and I’m moving to the exploitation phase. I am working via a private model where secrecy of the research results is required to ensure future, exclusive exploitation.

Let me know what you think of this analysis and whether you are interested in breakthrough basic research into the origin of life. I’ve tried to get collaboration on my terms, but I have no qualms about never disclosing this discovery.

Chances are that I’ve not discovered anything anyway, right? Right.

-leonard

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You’re not the kind who would do ...

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You’re not the kind who would you do ...

... but you can move down the risk scale and choose those ...

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... but you can move down the risk scale and chose those ...

If you do, you change the game ...

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If you do, we change the game ...

The presence of those two abilities in a single individual is rare.

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The presence of those two abilities in a single individual are rare.

I’m actually trying to win at the lottery of evolution ...

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I’m trying to win at the lottery of evolution ...

I’m never going to have that breakthrough mutation of an idea ...

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I’m never going to have that breakthrough, that idea that mutates me into another person ...

odds of winning go up by 100%

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odds of winning go up by 50%