Eh, I don't think the reason you don't see 18 y/o people doing significant work in materials science isn't directly the lack of alternate funding; it's that the

Eh, I don't think the reason you don't see 18 y/o people doing significant work in materials science isn't directly the lack of alternate funding; it's that there's no alternate funding for 18 y/o to do materials science b/c without proper background training they're unlikely to make any material progress in the field. This is the same reason there's no "alternate funding" for bright but undistinguished 45-y/o people with no prior background in materials science to go and do materials science (short of education loans for late-life career changers); it's a field that requires lots of education (in the sense of learning) and specialized skills and someone without those skills isn't likely to accomplish anything on the investment. Generally yes: advances come when you pair motivation to investigate topics of interest with freedom from more-mundane considerations and access to the necessary resources to make advances (idleness, if you will); as the frontiers of most applied sciences have gotten out of the reach of what wealthy dilettantes can easily afford you don't see them making many advances (but you do see plenty of advances in industry and academia, still, both of which allow their researchers enough of those things to make advances and both of which -- unlike most wealthy individuals -- can afford the tools many times over again). Please note that I was careful to say that the prospective 18 y/o outsider materials scientist (or what have you) needed the training usually acquired in a university context; I deliberately did not say that they needed a university education. It seems that for most bright-and-motivated types they could easily accelerate that training substantially if they had more freedom to choose courses a-la-carte; the loans-for-college approach currently doesn't allow for that kind of discretion, but a more financially-secure student would be better-placed to negotiate that. All that being said: there's almost no way that someone without the equivalent of that kind of training in an applied science will make material contributions to that field; at present economic constraints make it very hard to obtain even the equivalent of that training short of actually going to school and getting a degree (at which entails putting up with all the bs and time-wasting stuff that that entails).