The major misconception I always had was that thought experiments were tools for teaching, i. e. cute little metaphors to make special relativity accessible to

The major misconception I always had was that thought experiments were tools for teaching, i. e. cute little metaphors to make special relativity accessible to 16-year olds. The reality (on the macro scale :) was apparently that especially Einstein strongly relied on them to allow him to use project intuition into these rather strange realms he was working on. (The book I got this from added something like "because his math skills were relatively shallow", but people always misunderstand that because they don't see the unspoken context "... among physicists winning two or more Nobels")