Then I probably misunderstood you, I thought you were talking about how closely the math is tied to the actual world, say all the reformulations of classical me

Then I probably misunderstood you, I thought you were talking about how closely the math is tied to the actual world, say all the reformulations of classical mechanics as opposed to some supersymmetric theory. In the end physics is applied mathematics, once you have a theory that describes your observations, you can just study the mathematical structure and look for interesting things, only occasionally going back to the lab to verify your predictions, improving confidence that you picked the correct model.