I guess what I should have realized, and is my mistake, is that the idea of physics being completed is actually a philosophical issue, and given different philo

I guess what I should have realized, and is my mistake, is that the idea of physics being completed is actually a philosophical issue, and given different philosophical bases you can arrive at different conclusions. Ultimately, however, it's up to physicists to determine when their work is done, and as you say, they don't think it likely ever will be. For me things like turbulence and critical phenomena are the more interesting questions out there, because they're still very much human-scale, and our only excuse is that we can't compute at the scale required to verify results, the calculations are just too fantastically large.