That essay does a good job of laying out the physical reality, with a clear distinction between known and unknown.

I have to admit I have no physics background, other than decades of reading, which arose from an effort to understand how society functions and the seemingly obvious physical dynamics flowing through it. Yet when I did delve into physics as a field, I found all the same sociological idiosyncrasies played out, that I was trying to understand in the larger society.

For one thing, that success depends on supporting existing models, than questioning them. Since I have no professional commitments, I've been able to just step back and try to understand the bigger picture. Which, I feel, does present a fairly coherent dynamic, under all the layers of patches.

Not to make this too long, but what I see as the most significant issue is our perception of time.

As mobile organisms, our sentience coalesces as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. Which means we experience the point of the present moving past to future, as our most foundational concept of reality. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and generally assumes there to be an underlaying dimension of events. Where we could time travel through wormholes in the "fabric of spacetime," with the right application of mathematical faerie dust.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

In basic physical terms, there can be no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Which makes time an effect, similar to temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Energy is "conserved," because it is present and only present. Creating time. So there is no physical past to which it is lost, nor future from which it arrives.

As present, it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Basically like consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts giving it form go future to past, but that is a much larger topic.

So consider how this might affect how we understand physics, if energy and any information derived from it go opposite directions of time.

Currently quanta are referred to as being both waves and particles, but both are forms of information/form. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall, come and go, future to past. Like pretty much all aspects of life that we wonder why are transitory. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Now when we "see" a wave, the energy presents a spectrum, while when we "see" a particle, the energy has grounded into our testing apparatus, or rather the atomic structure of said device.

Like this dichotomy, the field is split as well, between those tending to see it as more particle and those seeing it as more wave.

String theory proposes there is some tiny vibrating string as the basis for the particles, but what that really means is there is some vibration, the source of which is assumed to be material. Yet is that a function of our own object oriented senses?

Consider the present; Events occur, from getting up in the morning, to conducting a physics experiment. Yet in order to be stored and remembered, more energy and structure has to be applied, or the energy of that moment quickly dissipates.

The only thing that can actually be "physical" is the energy, yet it is only the information it created that we can observe and measure.

Now consider that as physical organisms, our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems are processing the energy driving us on, while it is the central nervous systems sorting and ordering the information, that fades into the past, in order to decide our subsequent actions.

When you really start peeling away the layers, those obsessed with their subfields of subfields, really look like so many Red Queens and Alices down their rabbit holes.

Complexity is part of a cycle of expansion and consolidation. When complexity overwhelms your computer, you have to reboot it. That is where physics is now.