"The methods of science may be described as the discovery of laws, the explanation of laws by theories, and the testing of theories by new observations. A good analogy is that of the jigsaw puzzle, for which the laws are the individual pieces, the theories local patterns suggested by a few pieces, and the tests the completion of these patterns with pieces previously unconsidered." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Nature of Science and Other Lectures", 1954)
"[…] the progress of science is a little like making a jig-saw puzzle. One makes collections of pieces which certainly fit together, though at first it is not clear where each group should come in the picture as a whole, and if at first one makes a mistake in placing it, this can be corrected later without dismantling the whole group." (Sir George Thomson, "The Inspiration of Science", 1961)
"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently, generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is ‘really there’." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)
"Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by 'understanding' or 'comprehension' is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time." (Alan Watts, "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)
"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently, generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is ‘really there’." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1970)
"The sciences have started to swell. Their philosophical basis has never been very strong. Starting as modest probing operations to unravel the works of God in the world, to follow its traces in nature, they were driven gradually to ever more gigantic generalizations. Since the pieces of the giant puzzle never seemed to fit together perfectly, subsets of smaller, more homogeneous puzzles had to be constructed, in each of which the fit was better." (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth", 1975)
"Owing to his lack of knowledge, the ordinary man cannot attempt to resolve conflicting theories of conflicting advice into a single organized structure. He is likely to assume the information available to him is on the order of what we might think of as a few pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. If a given piece fails to fit, it is not because it is fraudulent; more likely the contradictions and inconsistencies within his information are due to his lack of understanding and to the fact that he possesses only a few pieces of the puzzle. Differing statements about the nature of things […] are to be collected eagerly and be made a part of the individual's collection of puzzle pieces. Ultimately, after many lifetimes, the pieces will fit together and the individual will attain clear and certain knowledge." (Alan R Beals, "Strategies of Resort to Curers in South India" [contributed in Charles M. Leslie (ed.), "Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study", 1976])
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