(Theoretical physicist, working in a different area) "Intuitive" means two different things in this context. One is that, over time, theoreticians certainly ga

(Theoretical physicist, working in a different area) "Intuitive" means two different things in this context. One is that, over time, theoreticians certainly gain a lot of intuition about how the relevant math works. That's no substitute for doing the work, but it does cut down on the number of mistakes you make, you often have a decent sense of what's definitely not going to work, etc. The other meaning is what people usually imply - that some combination of analogies with everyday phenomena finally "clicks" and you "understand" the physics all of a sudden. That's just nonsense. Past the natural limits of our everyday intuitions (which are very narrow indeed, consider how something as trivial as terminal velocity is often unintuitive to students in basic mechanics) physics is applied math, everything else is a crude approximation at best.