[physicles]

Sure, the frontier is always messy. Scientists talk about “quarks” and “dark energy” but those are just placeholders for “we kinda get what they do but we have no idea what they actually are.”

100 or 500 years from now, QM and GR will turn out to be approximations, or shadows, of some deeper theory. But that won’t change how insanely accurate their predictions are.

Our understanding of reality isn’t just moving forward, it’s getting asymptotically closer to ground truth. New theories may upend the conceptual framework, but they still just add decimal points — they have to, otherwise they’re worse theories than what we already have.