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That's the exception rather than the rule. I've heard it said, for example, that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
We still don't really know how many pharmaceuticals work.
In general, theoretical knowledge flows from experimental data and not vice versa. And even Einstein was not operating in a vacuum.
That’s because throughout almost all of human history, technology preceded science. One of the prevailing secular dogmas people have in the 21st century is the assumption that science drove technology, when in reality it’s the other way around; and science comes in after the fact and explains how it works.
As a side note to Einstein, not many people know among relativity experts, aspects of his theories are still hotly debated in niche areas as it relates to other aspects of physics relativity is related to. Just as there are a dozen or so some odd interpretations of quantum mechanics, there are different interpretations of general and special relativity as well; especially when you get to debates about cosmic time and absolute simultaneity. The tensed, neo-Lorentzian; “A-theory” interpretation of special relativity overcomes some of the very difficult problems implied by the EPR paradox in ways the orthodox B-theory interpretation we use today doesn’t.
IIRC, Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for relativity because many people at the time considered it to be in the realm of philosophy rather than science.
I certainly didn't know that!
Most people aren’t aware of it and the arguments are often too complex for the average/uninitiated layman. Unless you’re someone who makes heavy use of the theory professionally or in your day-to-day, it isn’t really relevant to know about in most cases.
One of the quirks of Einsteinian relativity is that it doesn’t disprove the existence of absolute space, but rather the foundations of the theory presuppose its non-existence; because the claims of the theory of special relativity which says that absolute space doesn’t exist, rests on the untenable assumptions of the verificationists of the school of Logical Positivism. The ontology of space-time becomes wholly reduced to what our measurements tell us. Einstein simply redefined simultaneity in terms of clock synchronization by light signals.
Per the earlier point about Lorentz I was making, Lorentzian relativity is fully equivalent Einsteinian relativity and the cutting edge of physics is actually more palatable to the former view of relativity than the latter. The experimental evidence that was produced by Bell’s Theorem actually suggests that relations of absolute simultaneity do exist, because the implications of the experiment says that in order to explain the results, one of two things has to be true:
There are faster than light causal influences between particles.
Particles are somehow non-causally correlated, so both particles instantaneously take on determinate properties.
In layman’s terms what that means is: the relativity of simultaneity postulated by the special theory of relativity has to be given up. It’s why Bell himself wrote when he was reviewing the implications of the experiment that there actually may be an “aether.” It’s not without problems though, since Lorentz frames implies things can go backwards in time, etc.; but there’s a real causal sequence that’s defined in the aether. And so Bell’s Theorem marked out a massive division between the two different interpretations of special relativity that’s still very much debated today. What it all ultimately means is that if action at a distance does occur, you have to give up Einstein’s interpretation of special relativity and return to Lorentz interpretation and also restore Newton’s concept of absolute space-time. You don’t have to give up the mathematical formalism, only Einstein’s interpretation of it.
These aren’t the only debates as such, but you get the gist of it.
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