1) The tools available to an individual are always progressing.
By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and materials, computational, theories and understandings, services, etc.
2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders, academic department heads, and grant comittees that have specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay for.
Many of the most important discoveries were never on anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it happened some other way first).
They only happened either by accident in real labs despite all conscious intention to be working on something else, or by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to work on something more sensible by any boss or other funding source.
3) It is true that some large scale things probably won't be advanced in a garage.
Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended specifically from a garage exactly because the garage researcher does not have the option to address problems with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.
They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on Etsy.
The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded lab.
1) The tools available to an individual are always progressing.
By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and materials, computational, theories and understandings, services, etc.
2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders, academic department heads, and grant comittees that have specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay for.
Many of the most important discoveries were never on anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it happened some other way first).
They only happened either by accident in real labs despite all conscious intention to be working on something else, or by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to work on something more sensible by any boss or other funding source.
3) It is true that some large scale things probably won't be advanced in a garage.
Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended specifically from a garage exactly because the garage researcher does not have the option to address problems with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.
They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on Etsy.
The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded lab.