Nothing wrong with thought experiments and philosophical arguments, as long as you use them properly. Proper use goes like this: 1) Identify some area where

Nothing wrong with thought experiments and philosophical arguments, as long as you use them properly. Proper use goes like this: 1) Identify some area where theory does not match experiment or other theories (in Einstein's case, there were known experimental issues involving the speed of light that were the basis for his work on special relativity, for example). 2) Use thought experiments, philosophical arguments, divine inspiration, inspired guesses, random guesses, etc to produce a theory that accounts for your known experimental data. I expect all of these have been used in the past, in fact. Einstein used thought experiments and philosophical arguments for special relativity but an inspired guess for the photoelectric effect. 3) Use your new theory to make new predictions about experiments that have not yet been performed. If there are no such predictions to be made from the theory that step 2 produced, then the utility of that theory is pretty limited, obviously. 4) Perform the experiments whose results you predicted in step 3 and see whether you predicted them correctly. It's important to publish the results of these experiments, especially if the theory did NOT predict the results you got. 5) Keep repeating steps 3 and 4 as much as possible, ideally with a variety of different predictions produced in step 3, to gain more confidence in the new theory. These are, of course, all "doing science". And insofar as they can be done by different people, one could spend all one's time on step 2 and be "doing science". But the scientific community as a whole is only "doing science" if it actually goes through all five steps. If it stops after step 2, that's not called "doing science".