On alien science
In his book The Fabric of Reality , David Deutsch makes the case for prioritising the explanatory role of scientific theories over their predictive role. I won't discuss this argument in detail, but a thought experiment given by Deutsch is fairly compelling. Suppose we had an “experiment oracle” that could predict the result of any experiment, but couldn’t tell us why it would turn out that way: “If we gave it the design of a spaceship, and the details of a proposed test flight, it could tell us how the spaceship would perform on such a flight. But it could not design the spaceship for us in the first place. And even if it predicted that the spaceship we had designed would explode on take-off, it could not tell us how to prevent such an explosion. That would still be for us to work out. And before we could work it out, before we could even begin to improve the design in any way, we should have to understand, among other things, how the spaceship was supposed to work. Only the