In economics, degrees serve the roles of prior selection filters, ability to complete tests, and easy to understand signals of approximate knowledge level.
Autodidacts can never hope to match the prior selection filter, but it seems conceivable that the knowledge level signal could be recreate through a credentialing equivalency test of some sort.
More like a github repo or published scientific papers which are good enough to be cited by others. Once you're over 30 or so and have had some real jobs if the local network is small enough, your interviewer probably knows someone who knows someone who knows what you can do.
Note that he's pretty old. I read a popular science/discovery magazine level bio of him in the 80s and he was old them. Unless this is his son following in dads footsteps? The relevance to being old is by analogy its impossible to get into the nuclear engineering biz in 2013 without a title of nobility, err, I mean a degree in nuke sci, but back in the 1940s the los alamos OG were shipping working product without the benefit of a title of nobility, err, I mean a degree. So its highly likely that when he was a kid and flooded lead acid was cutting edge high tech, there probably was no relevant title of nobility to bestow upon him when he was young, the field grew up around him such that a kid today could never break into the field without a title of nobility.
Autodidacts can never hope to match the prior selection filter, but it seems conceivable that the knowledge level signal could be recreate through a credentialing equivalency test of some sort.