Research Program / Claims / intuition-12

Einstein performed most of his work through intuition and imagery; had he trusted intuition more and left scientific proof to others, he could have discovered more.

爱因斯坦通过直觉和意象进行大部分工作，若更信任直觉、将科学证明留给他人，本可发现更多。

Concept intuition · Domain Intuitive–Rational Cognitive Integration · case evidence · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Historical portion: using Einstein's digitized manuscripts, correspondence, and working notes to establish a pre-registered sampling frame, extract at least 300 datable research episodes, and have dual coders blind to the research hypothesis annotate imagery, intuitive conjecture, mathematical derivation, and empirical testing over approximately 12 months; this assesses proportions within extant records but cannot determine the full composition of inner thought. Generalizable causal portion: approximately 240 physics graduate students or researchers are randomly assigned to imagery-then-verification, concurrent ideation-and-verification, or division-of-labor between ideation and verification strategies, and work for 6 months on unfamiliar but testable problems; the number of independently verified effective new solutions per total work hours is counted, rather than merely counting creative ideas.
Suggested paper title
Imagistic Simulation and Verification Strategies in Scientific Discovery: Archival Evidence and a Randomized Study
What it would overturn
If the division-of-labor strategy increases the number of effective discoveries per unit total work time, this would correct the strategic assumption that "the originator's simultaneous personal verification is necessarily more efficient," an assumption that is not an established universal law.
Candidate labs / funders
California Institute of Technology Einstein Papers Project：[项目](https://www.einstein.caltech.edu/); Jan Potters：科学思想实验的历史与哲学研究; Bert Leuridan：科学哲学与方法论研究; Joel Pearson，新南威尔士大学 Future Minds Lab：心理意象机制研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
"Could have discovered more" is an unobservable personal historical counterfactual; it does not specify whether "more" means conjectures, correct theories, or empirically tested discoveries, and lacks a distinguishable prediction.
Note
The important role of thought experiments has documentary support, but this cannot be used to infer that "most of the work" was so performed, nor to prove that trusting intuition and delegating verification to others would have increased Einstein's own output.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim intuition-12, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/intuition-12