Single Comment

''.... Aside from not knowing all of the rules, what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we canot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic questions of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we ''understand'' the world. How can we tell whether the rules which we ''guess'' at are really right if we cannot analyze the game very well? There are, roughly speaking, three ways. First, there may be situations where nature has arranged, or we arrange nature, to be simple and to have so few part that we can predict exactly what will happen, and thus we can check how our rules work. (In one corner of the board there may be only a few chess pieces at work, and that we can figure out exactly.) A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square. So, without being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea about the bishop's motion by finding out whether it is always on a red square. Of course it will be, for a long time, until all of a sudden we find that it is on a black square (what happened of course is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an overall way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in new places, the places where the rules do not work--not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules. ....'' -- 'Six Easy Pieces' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics