If the universe is irreducible, how is physics even possible?

Wolfram's answer is that irreducibility is only the generic case: it leaves room for "pockets of computational reducibility" — special slices where regular, predictable, formula-friendly behaviour emerges. [setup] He goes further and conjectures that the great reducible pockets we have already found have names — general relativity, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics — each cast as an island of predictability inside an otherwise irreducible world. [conjecture] So the claim is not that everything is unpredictable, but that science lives in the rare reducible corners; this identification of our theories with reducible pockets is a proposal, not a proven result.