> Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking rec

> Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking recipes, penicillin). I like to think of the grand theories as compression actually. Before ZFC, we just had a ton of knowledge and we asked if can we derive this from some set of blatantly obvious axioms and a group of geniuses basically did something like LZW and now we have ZFC and other such foundational theories.