"Jigsaw puzzles" were a magical game. A so-called "jigsaw puzzle" was essentially a complete image cut into countless tiny pieces and then scattered. The process of assembling it was to use the known condition called "memory" to first fix a very small number of pieces, then use the images on the known pieces to find others, finally summarizing the image's general patterns and advancing from the known into the unknown.
This was also everything so-called "scientists" did.
They extracted "known" fragments from the objective world, then summarized general laws and advanced from the known into the unknown.
The periodic table of elements could be called the greatest "jigsaw puzzle game" in human history. By fixing the known "pieces," it restored a perfect "image," reserved places for the "pieces" yet to be found, and accurately predicted the "shapes" and "patterns" of those "pieces"—their atomic masses and chemical properties.
Incidentally, after the first periodic table encompassing more than a hundred elements appeared and was proven correct, humanity was still dissatisfied. Using that periodic table as a foundation and mixing in their own understanding, they developed new periodic tables—in Earth's history, another one hundred and seventy periodic tables appeared after Mendeleev's [a number even greater than the number of elements themselves], some of them more intricate than the magic circles drawn by eighth-grader syndrome patients.
However, not every "jigsaw puzzle game" was as classic as the periodic table. There were only so many elements in the universe, and under normal temperature and pressure, only a little over a hundred could exist. By the time the periodic table was born, sixty-three elements had already been discovered.
Only when half the universe's elements had already been laid out before humanity could humanity infer the laws within them.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, the fragments