When I saw the title of your post, I thought of something else that could be pretty exciting: training research skills using independent rediscovery. For example, if you’re a chemist and have a vague idea that rubber can be vulcanized, you can work out the details yourself without looking it up. It’d probably need some more experienced people to choose the problems, so you don’t end up spending decades like Goodyear did, but it could be fun. In math of course it’s commonplace, when you read math you always try to work out proofs before looking ahead. But I don’t know how much it’s done in other fields.
When I saw the title of your post, I thought of something else that could be pretty exciting: training research skills using independent rediscovery. For example, if you’re a chemist and have a vague idea that rubber can be vulcanized, you can work out the details yourself without looking it up. It’d probably need some more experienced people to choose the problems, so you don’t end up spending decades like Goodyear did, but it could be fun. In math of course it’s commonplace, when you read math you always try to work out proofs before looking ahead. But I don’t know how much it’s done in other fields.