Another major offshoot of my amateur quests into formal academic subjects was a realization of how much it is still possible for a layman to stumble upon.

Before my rereading of Hamlet, any suggestion that I might make a contribution to the esoteric and heavily-debated issue of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays would have seemed the height of folly, if not delusion.  Likewise, for an amateur to be able to successfully challenge a widely-accepted college-level textbook in as left-brain and pure-science a subject as physics, and for the challenger to be a painter, had seemed outright unimaginable.

What had made these results possible?

I realized that I had come across an important clue in something that was said to me when I was first formulating my home-grown challenge to color theory.  In one exploratory phone call to a college physics department, a scientist candidly admitted that "nobody around here knows much of anything about color and light."  

After recovering from my surprise, I realized how this could be.   Color and light were subjects that Sir Isaac Newton had covered centuries ago, and were now considered more or less settled.  How could it benefit any contemporary physicist's career to specialize in something about which there was no longer much question?  To be in on the action, even scientists apparently need to cluster around "hot" contemporary topics—in a manner not ultimately all that different from Hollywood agents jostling to schmooze the next up-and-coming star. 

This may sometimes leave room for observant amateurs to come across things that the professionals have missed, just as gleaners once picked up the few remaining kernels of grain in a field after the main harvesting was complete.

In addition to getting a sense of the rhythms of intellectual interest in a given topic, I began to realize how the outer boundaries of human knowledge are not always the same distance away from common knowledge.   While the distance between the two is immense in some areas, in other areas even the experts don't know all that much more than us laymen.  For example, doctors still don’t know enough about the common cold to be able to do more than offer us advice on dealing with symptoms—advice with which many of us are already familiar, anyway.