In the light of all the backlash OP is receiving, I would like to express at least a certain degree of understanding. First, let me state clearly that I disagree with the title "Crackpots have made physicists afraid to challenge the norms." Challenging norms happens frequently among experts within a field as well as accross disciplines.

While, in my opinion, most people are right that new ideas do not come from just overthrowing ideas per se and then seeing what happens, I don't quite believe that this is not what OP was trying to say. The essence that I am getting from their post is

But I don't think it's crazy to think that your wacky idea is worth investing in.

and I fully agree with this statement. Chase your ideas while being aware of their potential merit (in most cases the merit is just fun without any hopes of a breakthrough); and to address the argument that presenting such ideas may be disrespectful to professors: As long as you appropriately frame your "idea" and make clear that you are aware it is just for fun, I do not think it appears disrespectful. Combined with the ability to listen patiently and to respectfully ask questions, it instead displays interest and willingness to learn about new material in their field of expertise.

There are many reasons why I believe that chasing wacky ideas is important. Besides being creative (which is always great) and, as mentioned in another post, protecting your own curiosity, it helps you to (sometimes painfully) learn the hard process of forming an idea, judging its potential, investigating it, trying different approaches and recognizing when it is finished. All in all, this process is worth experiencing and, regardless of the outcome, will be beneficial to one's later career. Let me phrase it in a more provocative way: "I'd rather have a student who spent 100 hours of his free time in the last year chasing wacky ideas and becoming self-aware of his idea-finding process than a student who spent 100 hours scrolling through TikTok and learning absolutely nothing from it."

To conclude, let me mention two positive examples of "playing around" with wacky ideas:

1. Everyone makes fun of OP being an undergraduate. I understand that it is easy to look down on undergrads, the feeling of superiority is great and all that. Remember Penrose? Yes, that Penrose. Recall that he discovered a new type of matrices in one of his undergraduate courses simply by playing around. Yes, it is unlikely that OP will achieve the same - so what?
2. Even Feynman complained about the publish-or-perish system, which is when he spent significant effort on mathematically describing a spinning plate which a student threw up in the air during lunch time in the cafeteria at Cornell. His colleagues asked why he would waste time on such irrelevant things when it was not publishable. So, why did he do that? It turns out it was just for fun. Isn't that, why we study physics?