It would be rough to go it alone. Research is probably a bit more social than most people imagine.
Nothing pokes a hole in a 'brilliant' idea like bouncing it off a colleague, and at the same time, you often need an outside perspective to decide if something is a breakthrough or dead-end.
Research groups often have a bunch of informal knowledge: a technique that sounds simple may have some subtle pitfalls; one that looks complicated might be really easy to apply in specific situations. Some published results, while maybe not wrong per se, are less generalizable or harder to replicate than the papers claim. A lot of this knowledge hasn't made it into the formal literature, but is very easy to pick up over coffee.
If you want people to read your papers (or fund your proposals), they need to be written in a way that the conventions of your field: how much detail is needed for various steps, what can you claim based on your results (and what shouldn't you claim), etc. Grad students usually learn these conventions by writing with senior people.
If your end goal is to learn this stuff from a professor, there's already a pathway for that: go to grad school! If your ideas were amazing, you could collaborate with one, but you're going to be competing with the prof's actual trainees for his time/attention, which will make it hard for you to get on the prof's radar to begin with.
Nothing pokes a hole in a 'brilliant' idea like bouncing it off a colleague, and at the same time, you often need an outside perspective to decide if something is a breakthrough or dead-end.
Research groups often have a bunch of informal knowledge: a technique that sounds simple may have some subtle pitfalls; one that looks complicated might be really easy to apply in specific situations. Some published results, while maybe not wrong per se, are less generalizable or harder to replicate than the papers claim. A lot of this knowledge hasn't made it into the formal literature, but is very easy to pick up over coffee.
If you want people to read your papers (or fund your proposals), they need to be written in a way that the conventions of your field: how much detail is needed for various steps, what can you claim based on your results (and what shouldn't you claim), etc. Grad students usually learn these conventions by writing with senior people.
If your end goal is to learn this stuff from a professor, there's already a pathway for that: go to grad school! If your ideas were amazing, you could collaborate with one, but you're going to be competing with the prof's actual trainees for his time/attention, which will make it hard for you to get on the prof's radar to begin with.