"When most of us think about science, we don't often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all actually is. Reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding what it is and how it works is the combination of what we can observe, measure, and experiment on."
"The enterprise of science, then, seeks to make sense of all of it, and to explain it as simply and powerfully as possible: to maximize our predictive power of nature's phenomena with as few assumptions, parameters, and variables as are absolutely necessary. We've come incredibly far in our understanding of the Universe, and can describe all of the particles and interactions that describe everything we can directly detect and measure exquisitely."
Science relies on observation, measurement, and experiment to compile a record of known phenomena and to construct explanations that maximize predictive power while minimizing assumptions. The goal of scientific enterprise is to explain the full suite of observed phenomena as simply and powerfully as possible, using as few parameters and variables as necessary. Modern physics has achieved precise descriptions of particles and interactions through the Standard Model and of gravitation through general relativity, and cosmology explains origins via the inflationary Big Bang. Outstanding puzzles such as dark matter, dark energy, and baryogenesis indicate that additional layers of explanation remain to be discovered, and a single Theory of Everything may face fundamental challenges.
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