Six Easy Pieces

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,

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 sometime we may discover a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the places where they do work!

It involves some new consequences which are not true.

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

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.

How do we know that there are atoms? By one of the tricks mentioned earlier: we make the hypothesis that there are atoms, and one after the other results come out the way we predict, as they ought to if things are made of atoms.

No machinery has ever been invented that “explains” gravity without also predicting some other phenomenon that does not exist.

to put together things which at first sight look different, with the hope that we may be able to reduce the number of different things and thereby understand them better.

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