Maybe to add to my own point, this gets at an interesting perhaps-philosophical question of the role of models and explanations in science. One extreme, closer to Asimov&#x27;s arguments here, could be to say that the point of science is just to write down accurate predictions about the world. If a model allows us to do this accurately, then we might tend to accept the model without concern to whether the model is what we think is &quot;really going on&quot;. I&#x27;m a bit more comfortable with this style of viewpoint because the proof is in the pudding (or rather the predictions) so it speaks for itself.<p>A more opposing viewpoint could be that the point of science is to develop these models that explain <i>why</i> things happen, not just <i>how</i> they happen. So conservation of momentum is interpreted not just as a description of what happens when bodies move or collide, but also as a reason why they behave as they do. This is a frightening viewpoint because I tend to agree with you that we are very far from really understanding what&#x27;s going on in physics; for example, imagining that some variant of string theory is true, this could completely change what we think &quot;mass&quot; means, even if the predictions about how objects behave is not very different.