To clarify, my point was that at least in my experience, this isn’t always the hard step. I can easily see that being the case in a “top-down” field, like a lot of engineering, medicine, parts of material science, biology and similar things. There, my impression is that once you’ve figured out what a phenomenon is all about, it often really is as simple as fitting some polynomial of your dozen variables to the data.
But in some areas, like fundamental physics, which I’m involved in, building your model isn’t that easy or straightforward. For example, we’ve been looking for a theory of quantum gravity for ages. We know roughly what sort of variables it should involve. We know what data we want it to explain. But still, actually formulating that theory has proven hellishly difficult. We’ve been on it for over fifty years now and we’re still not anywhere close to real success.
To clarify, my point was that at least in my experience, this isn’t always the hard step. I can easily see that being the case in a “top-down” field, like a lot of engineering, medicine, parts of material science, biology and similar things. There, my impression is that once you’ve figured out what a phenomenon is all about, it often really is as simple as fitting some polynomial of your dozen variables to the data.
But in some areas, like fundamental physics, which I’m involved in, building your model isn’t that easy or straightforward. For example, we’ve been looking for a theory of quantum gravity for ages. We know roughly what sort of variables it should involve. We know what data we want it to explain. But still, actually formulating that theory has proven hellishly difficult. We’ve been on it for over fifty years now and we’re still not anywhere close to real success.