: How to copyright ideas? I'm a phd student in physics/math who has some ideas about how these phenomenon occur. However, I do not have the experiments and mathematical theory done yet to support

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As others have said, you cannot copyright ideas. However, that is not really what you want to achieve here is it?

What you really want is to be credited with coming up with the ideas in the first place in the event that either you or someone else is able to do the science to prove them right. It's the recognition you want.

If you want to profit from the exploitation of your ideas, then you would need to come up with a method of exploiting them and copyrighting, patenting and otherwise protecting the exploitation.

My suggestion would be to publish as widely as you can. Write a self-published book; create a blog; physically print everything off and post (mail) it back to yourself so you have date proofs.

A suggestion: read the history of how Charles Darwin came to publish his internationally famous On The Origin of Species and then ask yourself why you have never heard of Alref Russel Wallace.

The key is not to procrastinate but to publish, publish, publish. If you do not blow your own trumpet, no-one else will and - worse - others may gain the credit for what you have done.

Finally, it is highly unlikely that the ideas you have are unique to you. Others may well be thinking along similar lines. There is never a perfect moment to go public, never a moment when you have everything carefully marshalled together. In the real world, there is intense competition in every aspect of life ... so act now, act fast and work out how to support your ideas later.

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Ideas can't be copyrighted. One could write a creative text with these, but then using them (in an entirely different text) will be completely viable.

If these ideas could be used as methods, technologies or devices, you can patent them. The one "beautiful" thing about patents is that they absolutely don't need to work for real, you just need to claim that they work - so whether the ideas are valid and true is moot. Still, if the ideas merely cover concepts of how things work in the nature, they won't be patentable. On top of that, the process of obtaining patents is lengthy and expensive.

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Thank gods, ideas are not copyrightable at all (in any country, as far as I know; particularly in the US under Section 102 of the Copyright Act, in Russia under Section 1259 of Civil Code, etc).

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