A lot of the value of being in a department is being able to have these shortcuts. I remember as an undergrad in physics asking why we didn't use imaginary time

A lot of the value of being in a department is being able to have these shortcuts. I remember as an undergrad in physics asking why we didn't use imaginary time to formulate special relativity? The grad students around me by and large looked puzzled and said they had never thought of it. A very, very experienced nuclear/mathematical physicist said, "Oh, yeah, folks did try that back in the early 20th century. It works fine, but you have to go to a full metric for general relativity, so why carry around two formalisms?" I contemplated that for about thirty seconds, said, "That makes sense," and happily put aside the question. It vindicates your thinking in that it indicates that you are picking up the techniques that professionals use to generate ideas. You just have to accept that as you're learning, most of the ideas will have been generated and addressed. What gets awkward is when you're doing interdisciplinary research and you're using the generative mechanisms from one discipline in the other. By and large both sides stare at you in confusion, or it requires multiple hour conversations to lead the other discipline's practitioners into a mental space where they can say, "Oh, yeah, that wouldn't be useful because of X." It makes the process of tuning your idea generation much slower. On the flip side, you hit the unknown way faster, sometimes great vistas of unknown where everyone goes, "Umm...wow. Yeah. Never heard of that continent. Let us know what you find."