To say that intuition, or one's mental picture of the world has nothing to do with a discovery of a fundemental explanation of how the world works is just wrong.

But I'm not. I'm saying that there are three distinct aspects of science:

1. Coming up with ideas for new models.

2. Building models that enable you to make predictions, then testing those predictions.

3. The body of knowledge derived from point two.

However, as Einstein pointed out in relativity, there are places where it makes all the difference and ignoring that problem masks the truth.

You are using the language of bullets 2) and 3).

An insight to that effect may have inspired his discovery of special relativity, but it is not pointed out as an assumption in the theory itself. And the original source of inspiration is no more necessary to understand the theory of relativity than having an apple-induced headache is a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian gravity.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.