Explanations bring light into the darkness, they clarify and help to understand. Research is about exploring phenomena and the conditions under which they come together: Why is something like this and not different? Why does this happen and not that? Which factors play a role, what are the variables and the limit values? When can I deduce something or make reliable statements about the larger context?

This search for reasons, for foundations and justifications happens differently depending on the discipline, sometimes in experiments, in laboratories or even digital twins of complex machines or entire factories. But explanations or indications of such are also found in studies of text corpuses, in evaluations of data sets or in representative interviews in qualitative or quantitative surveys.

Science and its attempts to explain the world necessarily remain open-ended tasks. Precisely because the world is constantly changing, science can never stop trying to understand and explain. At the same time, our instruments of measurement are also constantly improving, which helps us to open up new dimensions and gain deeper insights.