No, consider how you would collect a dataset to show F=GMm/r^2 you'd need to measure the force between planets, the distance between them, etc. no such direct

No, consider how you would collect a dataset to show F=GMm/r^2 you'd need to measure the force between planets, the distance between them, etc. no such direct measurements have taken place to my knowledge, certainly not at newton's time All "universal fn approximator" means is that given any dataset which is sampled from a function, you can recover that function with enough data points. It does not mean, eg., that given a 2D dataset you can derive a 3D function -- you cannot, this is impossible. So you need to be sampling from F=GMm/r^2 to find that function. So you need to know the answer before you begin. Fn approximators are only useful for empirical refinements to existing knowledge. In order to construct such datasets you need to do science; hence experiments, etc.