Fred Hoyle was wrong. Science is about explanations. David Deutsch explains why in _ The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World _.
The catch is that the explanations have to be "hard to vary"; that is, they have to be non-arbitrary. That's why a field like psychology fails while fields like math, micro-economics, biology, and physics succeed.
The catch is that the explanations have to be "hard to vary"; that is, they have to be non-arbitrary. That's why a field like psychology fails while fields like math, micro-economics, biology, and physics succeed.