Six Easy Pieces

The third way

While we may not be able to tell why Alekhine moves this particular piece, perhaps we can roughly understand that he is gathering his pieces around the king to protect it,

Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

When the scale is so small that we need the quantum effects, the gravitational effects are so weak that the need for a quantum theory of gravitation has not yet developed.

How can we tell whether the rules which we “guess” at are really right if we cannot analyze the game very well?

Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he doe

But what is the source of knowledge?

In recent years we have discovered that all mass is made of tiny particles and that there are several kinds of interactions, such as nuclear forces, etc. None of these nuclear or electrical forces has yet been found to explain gravitation.

First, there may be situations where nature has arranged, or we arrange nature, to be simple and to have so few parts that we can predict exactly what will happen, and thus we can check how our rules work.