[lulmerchant]

>relentlessly adjusted and overfitted and still appears very inadequate to fit all the evidence

Welcome to physics. The Copenhagen Interpretation is the most concise and robustly tested theory in all of physics. Yet it was dreamt up by a literal absurdist who thought that the universe itself has no objective state of existence. For all we know about the universe, we can still not answer many of the most basic questions about it. The lesson to be learnt from this is that our greatest theories are at best woefully incomplete, and that even our greatest scientists don't have the ability to talk about many things with any level of objective certainty.

[dbasedweeb]

Incomplete in very extreme conditions such as the interiors of black holes or the first instants after the Big Bang. I’m not really sure that’s “woeful” in a sense that matters to almost anyone other than a particle physicist or a cosmologist. For example the confidence in QED has been tested and found that the theory makes accurate predictions to within 10^-8.

I’d also argue that you’re substituting “basic” for “fundamental” and that’s bordering on dishonesty. We don’t have answers to some of the. OST fundamental questions, assuming we’re even asking the right questions, but the basics are well covered.

[lulmerchant]

An argument between ‘basic’ and ‘fundamental’ is a semantic one, and bordering on pointless.

QED works quite well in most cases, but only if you don’t look too closely, and only if you ignore one of the fundamental forces. QED offers no explaination for gravity, which even non-physicists know exists.

What is gravity? What is a particle? What is space? These are all quite basic questions that were not even close to having complete answers for. QED provides a “good enough” explaination for how particles and space work, just as relativity gives a “good enough” explaination of gravity. But any physicist who’s being intellectually honest knows that we only have a rudimentary understanding of these concepts. The wave function is just an excellent tool we use to smooth out our lack of understanding. Your comment is a perfect example of the arrogance that pervades the scientific community, and the inability to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. Which I think only inhibits the wider community’s ability to communicate effectively with the general public.