Cornell team says it's unified the structure of scientific theories

An anonymous reader writes: Cornell physicists say they've figured out why science works, or more specifically why scientific theories work – a meta theory. Publishing online in the journal Science Nov. 1the team has developed a unified computational framework they say exposes the hidden hierarchy of scientific theories by quantifying the degree to which predictions – like how a particular cellular mechanism might work under certain conditions, or how sound travels through space – depend on the detailed variables of a model.