Thanks for the clarification. What I meant by "basic science" was that we were able to model plasmas well enough to predict what would happen with something aki

Thanks for the clarification. What I meant by "basic science" was that we were able to model plasmas well enough to predict what would happen with something akin to CFD given a real model of the apparatus. So if you can do that with heuristics and "laws", that would meet my definition of "understood".