See Martin Milani‘s answer: “Novelty is not born from history. It arises from logic, imagination, and reasoning: asking “what if?”, testing counterfactuals, building on principles, and pushing beyond what data alone can reveal. Every major leap in science and technology — from Newton’s laws to Gödel’s incompleteness proofs — came not from extrapolating datasets, but from reasoning that transcended them.

And Einstein? He didn’t have mountains of data. What he had were logical thought experiments chasing beams of light in his imagination — that reshaped physics with reasoning and logic. As he famously said: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.'” Link