Humanity has done a fairly good job of trying to understand Nature with science. The scientific method of isolating relationships between variables. You change one thing and see how it affects something else.
Cause and effect.
Every action can be broken down into constituents, components, atomic units. For every effect there is a cause. We discover truths about the world by presupposing that it should make sense.
If you know what you want to look for, you’re more likely to find it. If you look for something that isn’t there, but you want it to be, you still have a chance of “finding” it.
The further you climb up that giant ladder of Knowledge, the smaller and smaller our focal point on the magnifying lens of Truth becomes. How much do we really know about the world around us? With all of our models, we can predict outcomes up until someone suggests a better theory.
The world was flat until we widened our view of the world was. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation was accepted as truth until Einstein changed it all with General Relativity. Biology was all about animals until we discovered cells and then DNA. Computing was all about doing math until someone thought it would be neat to store text with numbers.
We assume what we know is true until we discover otherwise. Until that moment it clouds our view of the world. A model of the universe is just that, only a model. The real universe doesn’t always follow our crappy models, no matter how many digits of precision and accuracy you verify.
Somehow, I don’t think Nature is running the numbers, calculating the inverse squares of distances between particles. I don’t think it’s determining Boltzmann factors just to chill a gas. There is something else at work. Something that we’re not seeing because we’re not looking for it. If we don’t know to look for it, we’ll only find it by dumb luck.
But isn’t that how most of the real science happens anyway?
Order out of chaos.