Einstein's work was based on a lot of evidence that seemed very strange. Light somehow had a fixed speed in all reference frames WTF?
Dunno, I don't really believe we are that close to building that sort of AI, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible, and it does seem like it could do things that to us would look as "more intelligent" than us. It might in the end be better at creating scientific knowledge in the way current computers are better than us at solving arithmetic: faster and capable of holding more in memory, rather than following any qualitatively different process. But even that would be enough.
Don't get me wrong I think it would be useful, just that the gap from human level AI to 1,000x human AI is simply not that huge. Let's say you moved someone from 2006 to 2016 or even from 1996. Yea sure there is real progress, but not really. We have better drugs in terms of AIDS for example, but we are worse off in terms of antibiotics. Game graphics have improved, but quake is from 1996 so we already had real 3D first person shooters and gameplay is not that different. Hell FTP is arguably worse. Further that's 20 years so we are talking literally millions-man years of effort and trillions of dollars worth of R&D for not much.
In terms of machines the SR-71 is still the fastest manned aircraft, no supersonic passenger aircraft. Tallest building is much taller, but lacks much space on the top floors making it more monument than utility as the sears tower has more useable space and a smaller footprint.
Maxwell's equations were a game changer. So were Newton's laws. So were Relativity and QM.
Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since.
There's been a lot of application, but no game-changing deep theoretical insights.
Quantum computing may - should? - eventually throw up something new.
It's going to have to. If it doesn't I think we're going to be stuck with much less progress than we're expecting.
Quantity when the difference is large enough becomes quality. The 9 orders of magnitude or so that computers have gone through in storage capacity and speed definitely count as a game-changer.
It's conceivable that someone could construct a special-purpose AI which isn't superhuman but uses advanced ML and NLP algorithms to mine the scientific literature for previously unnoticed implications and relationships between seemingly unrelated articles. But I expect that would only give a suggested starting point for human researchers to formulate hypotheses and design experiments.
Human intuition was the major thing getting in the way, and even Einstein's intuition got in the way of his acceptance of quantum mechanics.