What? or Why? Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, 1997
"Being able to predict things… is not at all the same as understanding them."
Formula are useful for collapsing data but do not amount to understanding.
"…some philosophers -- and even some scientists -- disparage the role of explanation in science."
"…imagine that an extraterrestial scientist has visited the earth and given us an… oracle which can predict the outcome of any possible experiment, but provides no explanations… to use it… we must first know what experiments to ask about… the oracle would have to have some sort of user interface… In that language some experiments would be harder to specify than others… put another way: there already is one such oracle out there, namely the physical world."