Einstein's major breakthrough in special relativity wasn't a mathematical discovery, but his intuitive mental model of the impossibility of racing against a lig

Einstein's major breakthrough in special relativity wasn't a mathematical discovery, but his intuitive mental model of the impossibility of racing against a light beam. The mathematical transformation that follows from that had already been put to paper by Lorentz. But anyone would still call Einstein a theoretical physicist. Faraday had his own theory of physics, essentially the underpinning of field theory, which was held entirely in his head. He tried to describe it to his peers in letters, and they mosy just couldn't grasp what he was talking about because of the distance between his ideas and theirs. So instead he just demonstrated in one revolutionary experiment after another that his ideas made sense, and everyone else had to race to keep up. But unlike Oersted, Faraday didn't stumble into his discoveries. He designed his apparatus to prove the behaviour he already had imagined must be there. (Sometimes he'd stumble by trial and error into the materials he needed, but materials science is hard and he was pretty good at that too).