I'm guessing that this is likely to be more depressing. I like to consider myself as one of those amateur physicists who Hooft talks about. .. but instead of t

I'm guessing that this is likely to be more depressing. I like to consider myself as one of those amateur physicists who Hooft talks about. .. but instead of the deep academic physicist researcher kind, I prefer to be the playful kind. I've filled a notebook with such play. It is likely to be of no use to a professional physicist, but I certainly had fun thinking about things. A couple examples - 1. I tried to work out a formula for refractive index of a material assuming that photons get slowed down by it through repeated absorption and re-emission. 2. I asked "what if gravity obeyed maxwell's equations?" Iirc some approximate calculations based on it turned ou something like newtonian laws would hold if we're living on the inside of an exploding blackhole (or something like that). I don't know whether I went anywhere with those, but they were interesting to think about when I knew enough math to do them. I'm quite sure such play is well within the reach of amateur theoretical physicists even if you may not end up solving the domain's pressing problems.