The Keplerian Interval

Between 1609 and 1687 there was a Keplerian interval: the three laws of planetary motion existed, were precisely correct, were predictively powerful, and were physically unexplained. Kepler had the description without the reason; Newton supplied the reason by deriving all three laws from a single law of universal gravitation. The description was not nothing—it reorganized the cosmos and gave Newton the target he needed—but it was also not understanding, and Kepler knew it and spent the rest of his life hunting the physical mechanism he never found. This gap between pattern and comprehension, description and explanation, is the precise location of contemporary large language models: systems that capture the statistical structure of language with extraordinary fidelity, that are correct and predictively powerful within the distribution they were trained on, and that do not understand—in the sense of possessing a causal account of why the patterns hold—any of what they describe. The Keplerian interval is not a criticism; it is a