Right, in fact it's very much "a thing" for bored/retired engineers (or otherwise physics-adjacent) to guess a new physics principle and convince themselves tha

Right, in fact it's very much "a thing" for bored/retired engineers (or otherwise physics-adjacent) to guess a new physics principle and convince themselves that it must be correct without actually doing the boring and difficult work of checking it against existing known-good principles / data and coming up with experiments that prove it to be usefully differentiated. You know, the difficult parts of science. This is the source of a steady stream of crackpots that regularly pester the physics community. Don't be one of them. If your trajectory doesn't include a bunch of graduate level physics classes, a literature review, and a big math slog, you are at risk. Existing techniques are very powerful and you need to know them well before you know what counts as a genuine addition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11lPhMSulSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11lPhMSulSU