Where do ideas come from?

I was reading for The Rise of Modern Science and it references Einstein and his theory of relativity. It raised an interesting question about how Einstein could have come up with such a revolutionary theory. According to the author, there are “two equally problematic positions on the relation of things to thoughts.”

The first position is that all ideas emerge based on prior experiences and ideas, essentially continually building upon previous conclusions and progress. This is the way that scientific development is traditionally though to go: a question is raised based on something previously misunderstood or unexplained, some kind of experiment is then executed to investigate, and some sort of conclusion is reached based on the results of the experiment. Depending on how successful the experiment is, and whether the right areas were investigated, the conclusions could be some definitive answer to the initial question. So the progress made would be a direct result of previous conjecture.

The other position is that the idea comes first, providing a framework for raising questions and designing experiments. This view makes any idea much more novel, as it seems like it has no material inspiration, that it is purely the brainchild of the theorist. This is not entirely true, it seems as all human conjecture has some sort of basis, all thought follows a path and has an origin, no matter how nebulous.

I thought this might be an interesting idea to pursue as I work on the experiment system, so that whenever an experimenter posts an experiment they’d have the option of indicating what other experiments inspired their project, so you’d be able to see the progress of a certain idea. Then the users or experimenters would be able to see how certain aspects of the project originated from another project, or were continued in following experiments.