Gershenfeld's Law on Research
Experiments take pi times longer than planned (no matter how many factors of pi you account for).
Gershenfeld's Law on Writing
Good [theses, papers, books] are never finished, just abandoned.
Gershenfeld's Goal
Function from form.
"Form follows function" implies that they're separable; the most profound scientific and technological insights that I know follow from abstracting logical functions from physical forms.