I would caution you that Polanyi's ideas have been distorted beyond recognition by the more extreme post-modernists , who contend that, because all human knowledge is socially constructed, none of it can have any claim to truth. In fact, one need not even be a genius to be a good scientist as long as one understands one's field and is willing to do the patient drudgework of measurement. Where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. Theory is the forging of knowledge into understanding, and has be seen as a prosaic process. Someone whom I cannot remember divided scientists into synthesizers , who try to find the common core which explains a variety of facts, and the diversifiers , who take joy from uncovering more and more complex processes.
Synthesizers tend to be theorists, and diversifiers experimentalists.
But it would have been even better to have found something totally unexpected, so that the theorists would have had to go back and work harder. Scientists are people of simple faith in the intelligibility of the universe, as Vannevar Bush saw. While some scientists take this inflated view of scientific knowledge, most of them are more humble. For example, Duke University biologist Matt Cartmill recently wrote in Discover magazine, If biologists don't want to see the theory of evolution evicted from public schools because of its religious content, they need to accept the limitations of science and stop trying to draw vast, cosmic conclusions from the plain facts of evolution. Louis Pasteur pointed out that There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science.