We review how inductive methods operate on recursive data to uncover empirical laws as those of Physics, as well as the research programme of weakening learning criteria aiming at identifying the class of recursive functions. We think that this work should be better known, namely as of applications to understand large scale limitations of scientific discovery. There are two main concerns in this talk. The first is to convince you that the set of recursive relations is a good model of the universe of potential empiric laws. The second is to make the point that any such law can potentially be discovered by an unconventional scientist that accepts to weaken the criteria of what is “to know a law”.