The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals

if Heisenberg triumphed, a fundamental aspect of the laws that governed the physical world would remain forever obscure, as if chance had somehow nested in the heart of matter and become inextricably bound to its most fundamental constituents.

whatever criteria we used to judge scientific theories, how could the fact that a theory satisfied those criteria today possibly imply anything about what will happen if we rely on the theory tomorrow?

But there is another side to Galileo’s discovery which is much less often appreciated. The reliability of scientific reasoning is not just an attribute of us: of our knowledge and our relationship with reality. It is also a new fact about physical reality itself,

At the subatomic level, the world turned out to be very far from Newtonian, with uncertainty built into the very fabric of matter.

Because of the way in which scientific knowledge is created, ever more accurate predictive rules can be discovered only through ever better explanatory theories. So accurately rendering a physically possible environment depends on understanding its physics.