When I studied physics as an undergrad, I was made to take a course in experimental particle physics (in Germany they call this "Phenomenology", not in English

When I studied physics as an undergrad, I was made to take a course in experimental particle physics (in Germany they call this "Phenomenology", not in English to my knowledge). I complained that I wanted to study the fundamental laws of physics, not how they were tested. They university advisor replied that in order to understand how the world works, first we have to know what it looks like. This is basically my view on this matter. We can only take for granted the existence of the objective universe. Everything else must be derived from experiment, including concepts that seem fundamental like time or causality. One interesting thing about causality is that the fact that the macroscopic world obeys cause-and-effect laws is usually attributed to the second law of thermodynamics. But where does the second law of thermodynamics come from? I've heard it stated (can't say if this is universally held by physicists) that the second law of thermodynamics holds because the initial state of the universe had very low entropy, while the final state of the universe will have very high entropy. That is the second law of thermodynamics is "caused" by both the initial and final states of the universe. So causality and time are something that we don't fully understand yet.