The goal of science has always been to predict the outcome of experiments, because that's what distinguishes science from philosophy or alchemy or faith. Anyone

The goal of science has always been to predict the outcome of experiments, because that's what distinguishes science from philosophy or alchemy or faith. Anyone who believes that they've discovered an underlying principle is almost certainly mistaken; with time, "underlying principles" usually become discredited theories or, sometimes, useful but crude approximations that we teach to high schoolers and undergrads. Prediction is understanding. What we call "understanding" is a cognitive illusion, generated by plausible but brittle abstractions. A statistically robust prediction is an explanation in itself; an explanation without predictive power explains nothing at all. Feeling like something makes sense is immeasurably inferior to being able to make accurate predictions. Scientists are at the dawn of what chess players experienced in the 90s. Humans are just too stupid to say anything meaningful about chess. All of the grand theories we developed over centuries are just dumb heuristics that are grossly outmatched by an old smartphone running Stockfish. Maybe the computer understands chess, maybe it doesn't, but we humans certainly don't and we've made our peace with the fact that we never will. Moore's law does not apply to thinking meat.