Pretty much the entirety of modern physics is this type of abstraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natur

Pretty much the entirety of modern physics is this type of abstraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...). You are just facing the discomfort felt when your intuition clashes with the tools usually required to make reliable predictions and explanations about the universe. Consider, how is your current discomfort with this statement any different from the discomfort felt through the centuries when ideas like fields instead of forces, entropy, phase spaces, quantum amplitudes / complex numbers, matrix mechanics, spacetime, curvature, etc were being introduced. They are all abstractions that end up being more reliable than our intuition. Whether this "abstraction" is a "real thing" is a question for the philosophers. For me there is no difference between the two.