The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth.' But what is the source of knowledge' Where do the laws that are to be tested come from' Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations'to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess. And yet, in a provocatively titled 2014 article, Biology is more theoretical than physics, systems biologist Jeremy Gunawardena challenged this view about the relationship between biological theories and experiments. He...
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