> It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

But philosophy is not knowledge, and it is in fact math that is the only form our knowledge can have in this area, whether we like it or not.

Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value. The operations have become more abstract over time, but they're still more complex variations on the same underlying concepts - for example generalising 3D Euclidean space to the abstract ideal of a set of relationships in a mathematical space defined by some metric.

There's nothing absolute about either the math or the metaphor. Both get good answers in relatively limited domains.

One obvious problem is that reality may use a completely different set of mechanisms. Physics is really pattern recognition of our interpretation of our experience of those mechanisms. It's not a description of reality at all. It can't be.

And if our system of metaphors is incomplete - quite likely, because our experiences are limited physically and intellectually - we won't be able to progress past those limits in our imagination.

We'll experience exactly what we're experiencing now - gaps between different areas of knowledge where the metaphors are contradictory and fail to connect.

This is all wrong, unfortunately, and that’s because it is based on a wrong premise. Experience and knowledge are two different things, and whether we are capable of experiencing certain aspects of reality or not, math is how we know things. In the areas we cannot experience directly the ability to form mathematical images and ideas can even be thought of, if you will, as an extension of our ability to “see.”

>Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value.

If you experience pushing this object that feels to weigh 1kg with a force that feels like 1 N, you are going to experience seeing it accelerate at 1m/s^2.

My point is that there is nothing magical about this model or that model.

HEP experimentation is just exploring parameter space and seeing if our models hold up.