First, lets have a look at what we understand under 'idea' and 'experience', because if we understand different things under those terms, that would lead to misunderstanding, and that could lead to a discussion where in the end we would find out that we do understand the same about it, and that the discussion could have been avoided. If the foundation of this text isn't stable, then nothing built on it will be.

Its like building a castle in the air 25 meters above a swamp, and thinking it is being built on a rock 25 meter high. There is quite a difference between the two, as you would surely agree.

So what do we understand about an idea, an experience? We all use the word, we are aware that we have ideas, but explaining what we understand as to be an idea, and experience, doesn't seem to be so easy. I have tried, and I failed to find an explanation that would be clear enough, and universal enough. So here are definitions of what the terms 'idea' and 'experience' mean.

A short definition of what the term 'idea' means:
An idea (Greek: ιδέα) is a specific thought or concept that arises in the mind of a person as a result of thinking. The term arises in both popular and philosophical terminology.

A short definition of what the term 'experience' means:
Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.

Now that we are clear about what both terms mean, let's have a look at some examples, of what is know about ideas and the people involved in them, who came up with them, and used them.

Introduction

This quote from Nature via Nurture (p 231) says it all:

"It is bad enough to be eclipsed on the brink of eternal fame by a competitor, but imagine how much worse it feels if that competitor has been dead for more than a decade and lived his entire life in total obscurity inside a monastery. No wonder Hugo De Vries stares rather unhappily out of my photograph. In 1900 he published a radical theory, for which he felt he deserved the sort of acclaim that had been showered upon John Dalton and was about to be showered on Max Planck.

Where Dalton had suggested that matter is composed out of atoms (which Democritos had came up before in ancient Greece, and the word atoms comes from him, although it no longer means now what he meant with it ), and Planck would treat light as coming in lumps, De Vries to had come up with a quantum theory - that inheritance comes in particles: ' The specific characters of organisms are composed out of separate units.' He had deduced this by a series of brilliant experiments hybridising varieties of plants and he had even hit upon a truth that would take a century to be proven true. He speculated that these particles of heredity, which he called the 'pangens', did not obey the species barrier, so that a pangen for hairiness in one plant was also responsible for hairiness in another hairy species of flower.

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