When Newton described the laws of gravity, now often referred to as Newtonian physics, did he explain what gravity was, in other words, did he have a "theory of

When Newton described the laws of gravity, now often referred to as Newtonian physics, did he explain what gravity was, in other words, did he have a "theory of operation of the model, except the implicit one"? No, au contraire! He gave laws that took gravity as a black box, but worked very well allowing us to predict things "like how I expect". It has been argued that giving up on explaining what gravity really is, and instead focussing on being able to predict its workings, has been one of Newton's great insights. One might argue that we still don't understand what gravity and the remaining fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong and weak forces) really are, we still treat them as a black box, just like modern ML research mostly treat transformers (and similar) as a black box. That's normal science. Indeed, what else can you do? The fact that "it works like how I expect" and that there is a clear trajectory of working more and more "like how I expect" is a strong indicator of scientific progress.