Ways in which doing a jigsaw puzzle is like science:

  • an iterative cycle between gathering evidence (taking pieces out of the box) and attempting to see how they fit together
  • every piece is part of the whole: each fact must fit into reality somehow

Also, I wonder about the rate of puzzle completion over time. Imagine plotting “pieces solved / minute”. Is the rate decreasing as you pick off the low-hanging fruit? Or increasing as there as fewer remaining facts need to fit into a better-understood framework? Related obviously to the Progress Studies folks.