“There’s a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff that you think is truly fundamental. Then you presume that the other things you don’t understand are details. The assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state—this is the true analytic notion—and then somehow you put these together in more complicated ways when you want to solve more dirty problems. If you can.
