Wow. Great response Erik. Made me think of these bits of thought:
From the movie "The King's Speech":
Lionel Logue: They're idiots.
King George VI: They've all been knighted.
Lionel Logue: Makes it official then.
Gordon, this is great and almost true. Sad to say, I see this often when looking at thesis work that young engineers and others work on to get their degree from graphic arts oriented institutions. These young people are not idiots but are forced to be ones in order to get a degree. If they want to have a career in a graphic arts institution the pressure to not think independently is much greater.
This is unfortunately an industry where breakthroughs are scarce. Breakthroughs by young people is even less. There is a reason for this and it directly relates to how the young are educated. There is no foundation in rational and valid knowledge for them to make the next advance in thinking. No solid shoulders to stand on.
I am an engineer (BASC, Bachelor of Applied Science) which is a more theoretical engineering education and I have been looking at the offset process on and off for 25 years. I have patents, I have knowledge but experts in the industry don't want to listen to what I say. If they don't listen to someone with my background, why would they listen to some young student that has some new ideas. Not a chance.
I view most things as a problem solving process.
Advice from others can be helpful but not always when wanting to know how a particular technology or method works or in dealing with a problem. That is done on this forum all the time and many have been helped.
Problems that are pushing the boundaries of knowledge are a totally different game. You can't get valid advice from people who have no experience in this new area of the field. If you get advice, it is in the form of conjecture of what might happen because they don't really know. So with any advice one would get, that advice must always be confirmed.
Also your own view is a form of advice you give to yourself all the time. Don't trust yourself either. Never take a position where you think something is 100% true or 100% not true. One needs to deal with probabilities of something being true. This help one keep an open mind to something you might have missed. This is very important. One has to be humble.
So what do you use to confirm advice and ideas against? The laws of Nature never change. Physics is an attempt to describe these laws. Real processes have many phenomena happening at the same time. One has to break things down, always comparing them to the Laws and reconstructing a new picture of how things really work in that process. What is important and what is not. If successful, you have then developed a science for that field that can be used in a predictable way. Predictability is important.
Your tools are math, physics, observed phenomena, analysis, logic, imagination, mind experiments and controlled testing. Added to this is the need to do deep thinking about the problem and use the "Why" method of going deeper and deeper. Along the way, you will find out what you need to learn.
So this fits with Lukas's interest in thinking about prepress in new ways. He might also look at how other industries pass information around that results in predictable reproduction of parts etc.
He should not be scared in thinking that the problem is too big or difficult. One does not know if a problem is difficult or easy to solve until it is actually solved. Even if he does not reach the holy grail of prepress, he will have a much deeper understanding of the issue by trying to look for improvements. It does take patience. Long Swedish winters should provide that.