No, because the bottleneck isn't the thinking but running experiments.

I worked in solar research, assembling a cell to test implied 40 different steps and from beginning to testing it was around 4 to 5 days.

This means that in one year working full time I will realistically run 40ish different experiments. Many of those will need to be done multiple times, and when you have 40 different steps that can go wrong and kill your efficiency this further compounds.

Thus realistically are running 5 to 10 different experiments (or better, a handful plus their variations).

At no point in this process you're like "yeah, if only LLMs could provide ideas", it's just not true, you get millions of ideas, time and bodies are the limit.