As a kid I read the whole Michelson–Morley experiment in a public library. It was a quite a peek into how the science of that era was done. Basically you start

As a kid I read the whole Michelson–Morley experiment in a public library. It was a quite a peek into how the science of that era was done. Basically you start with some base information(axioms and postulates), then you gather some experimental evidence for those axioms and postulates. You establish some rules on which your experimental and observational universe works. Then what follows is volumes and volumes of Math. If Im not wrong relativity itself was developed over a decade. And I'd assume it took tons and tons iterations, retries and tweaking to make it work. Where common people like us get lost is looking at Symbol manipulation directly. At that stage Math scares the day light out of us. The right approach is to start with your own axioms, postulates, truths and symbols and start working from there. This is really like some newbie seeing a super massive code base and thinking it could be outside their reach to ever work with such a thing. But if you look at it carefully. All there is to it is loops, condition statements, operations, variables and basic abstractions.