I dunno, from Archimedes to Newton, and from Maxwell to Einstein, most important scientific discoveries arose from thinking breakthroughs (and led to better tools, as opposed to having been caused by them). The "better tools" at most helped verify it after it was expressed, not reach it.
It's the incremental, evolutionary stuff, that's mostly helped by better tools...
Yes, and in this example theoretical physics is providing the new tools for experimental physics to attempt to find ways to work with.
And sometimes pure mathematics people are off making new tools that the theoretical physicists can later use to expand their playground.
“It's maths all the way down” is the modern “it's turtles all the way down”!
You can think up "breakthroughs" all you want, it's easy. As any mathematician or software developer can confirm, it's easy for a human to propose an explanation and immediately convince themselves of its correctness; validating hypotheses is hard work that the brain desperately tries to avoid. And in physics, validating things on paper can only get you so far - you ultimately need experimental confirmation to make solid science.
Here is where technology becomes necessary: in order to favor one hypothesis over the other, you need to find where they give conflicting predictions, and then check what actually happens in reality. That's only possible when you can perform the necessary experiment and observe the results with sufficient precision to discriminate between competing explanations. Technology is what gives you this capacity, expanding the scope of experiments you can run.
As someone else mentioned, you could drop Einstein back a few hundred years and his work would be laughed off - because ultimately there would be no way to tell if he's right or not. The theory may look beautiful (if complex) on paper, but if you can't discriminate between it and alternatives through an experiment, it's meaningless and you may as well use the simplest model that fits all your current observations.
While they do so, they validate the said scientific breakthroughs. Science is not only about coming up with models or hypotheses. Science is "theory and validation." Take out either of them, and you don't have science.
Humans have been theorizing and creating mental models for thousands of years. But only with the better tools were they able to select verified models, and discard those that didn't fit the observation, and as a consequence, make more and more sophisticated and accurate predictions.
To take two recent examples, the first photograph of the black hole and the first detection of gravitational waves (both predicted by Einstein's GR, coincidentally) required a stupendous amount of collective brainpower of brilliant engineers and scientists. 100% of that brainpower went into figuring out building those better tools and analyzing the collected data. The scientific community itself has acknowledged the criticality of those better tools, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for building a "better tool" to observe gravitational waves, LIGO [1].
This is not to say that theory isn't important but to call out that observational tools are not "at most help verify theory" but are an integral part of science.
There is, of course, a way to validate theory within its own framework and that is what mathematicians do. I guess the philosophy is a similar domain, but I have not read much about it, so I can't comment much.
On a related note, I highly recommend this panel discussion about the topic of GW, LIGO etc., from the horses' mouth. LIGO is absolutely mind-blowing, a testimony to collective human ingenuity [2].
[1] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-2017-nobel-p...
"The BS model: Science => Technology => Practice.
Historically, the truth: Practice =>Technology =>"Scientific" misattribution"
Information theory came after people were already sending signals over the wire. Similarly, there were architectural feats before geometry or Newton’s laws were discovered.
There's only so much a naked eye can observe. Technology drives science by allowing us to observe more things.
Technology is how we extend the set of things to which these principles can be applied, and thus the set of things we can learn about our world.
edit: re-read your comments again, and i see your point now. You are absolutely right.