I am a physicist and one thing that you realise, as you develop as a scientist, is the fact that the perception that "physics describes everything perfectly" is

I am a physicist and one thing that you realise, as you develop as a scientist, is the fact that the perception that "physics describes everything perfectly" is not true. When you start out, lets say as an undergraduate, you feel the pressure to be "correct". You struggle to find the correct answers or construct them. The breakthrough comes when you realise that we use mathematics as a tool to extract answers; we do our best to make the best educated guess we can and interpret the results. A great example would be with something like density functional theory (DFT), where we make extremely crude approximations for exchange and correlation functionals. By understanding the limits of our model we can use this information to improve the results; as Feynman said: "The first job of a theoretical physicist is to prove yourself wrong as fast as possible". I'm not sure I agree with your last statement: >Up to a point, using models might be a limit to physics. I argue that this is the most important thing to physics. The moment you start to leave a model, you allow for subjective speculation. I argue that this has no place in physics and is the prime reason that physics has broken away from philosophy.