&gt; Sure, you need some knowledge, but you&#x27;d better believe other people have that knowledge as well.<p>For any <i>chunk</i> of knowledge, except for very unlikely ties,
there was a first person who
had that knowledge, and for that person, then, the claim is false.<p>It really is possible to do
research that is genuinely new.
Indeed, the usual criteria for
publication are &quot;new, correct,
and significant&quot;.  Criteria for
a Ph.D. dissertation are
sometimes &quot;an original contribution 
to knowledge worthy of
publication&quot;.
Each each paper published in
a peer-reviewed journal
of original research is supposed
to be an example.  When the US
NSF or NIH give research grants,
there is supposed to be research
that will be publishable in
a peer-reviewed journal of 
original research, that is,
new, knowledge that
did not exist before.<p>In computing, we write software.
It takes in data, manipulates
it, and puts out data.<p>For my startup, I wanted some
software that would 
take in some available data, do some powerful manipulations, and put out
some valuable data.  So 
to get some powerful manipulations, difficult to
duplicate or equal, and to know
right away that the manipulations were correct
and likely powerful,
I wrote out some original
applied math.  I have to doubt
that anyone else in the world
has written out anything
really the same.  Then I
wrote software to perform
the data manipulations 
specified by the math.<p>The software and the math
are my proprietary intellectual
property, and I intend to
use trade secret protection.
Tell the world the details?  Heck no.<p>Am I able to do such original
math derivations, &quot;original
contribution to knowledge&quot;,
&quot;new, correct, significant&quot;?
Yup, as demonstrated by my
Ph.D. dissertation and published,
peer-reviewed papers.