the act of coming up with hypotheses and then testing them is kinda how knowledge is generated, though. and often it can be effectively done by people who aren't thoroughly knowledgeable in a subject, especially as a means to becoming such
The problem here is the conflation of "mathematical model" and "theory" in physics, which doesn't hold in general language. Physicists have gotten stuck on the idea that the math doesn't just predict reality, it "is" reality. In truth, a mathematical model can be perfectly correct and also nonsensical, just look at any neural network. A theory should really be an philosophical/ontological thing, and a model should be a mathematical thing.
