&gt; collection of useless factoids<p>We call it <i>phenomenology</i>. The very base of any proper science. The rest is just a mechanical work of eliminating the noise from this data.<p>Science should <i>never</i> produce any knowledge which is not found in the original data (either passive observations or controlled experiments - does not really matter). The scientific method is all about techniques of extracting the most compact representation (i.e., the <i>information</i>) hidden inside this massive data sets. It turns out that the axiomatic theories are very common and compact representations for many areas of science, but not necessarily the universal representation.