I think a better example than frictionless surfaces and no air resistance would be idealized symmetries. Once something like Coulomb's Law was postulated physicists would imagine the implications of charges on infinite wires and planes to make interesting predictions.

We use the trolley problem and its variations as thought experiments in order to make predictions we can test further with MRIs and the like.

So a publication on interesting trolley problem results would be like theoretical physics paper showing relativity predicts some property of black holes.