"Gremlins" is a very lazy way of making a strawman. Just because one can't imagine a different universe does not mean gremlins made it. All scientific knowledge we discovered made some previously true piece of knowledge false. It is a pretty bad attitude to make fun of people simply stating we could be wrong. We are most definitely wrong. Imagine somebody from 1000 years in the future read this; how embarrassed would they be that people believed what we believe?
Of course I make fun of it. It's the only way to cope with this kind of stuff after being exposed to it for decades. It's cranks in physics, they don't take the trouble to really look up anything by doing actual work, they just know that everything's wrong. It's all there: dark matter doesn't exist, the universe isn't expanding, the big bang is a lie, string theory is bogus, quantum mechanics is incomplete and/or we don't understand it. The list used to include that Einstein was wrong and Special Relativity was false, luckily that's becoming rather unfashionable nowadays.
I'm sorry, but there's a pattern here. Whatever kind of scientific topic that drives "common sense" folks out of their comfort zone has to be wrong, because well, it has to be. It doesn't matter that there are actual measurements and heaps of relevant technical literature full of excellent reasons for this or that theory (I mentioned a few). Whatever the people working in a field find convincing just can't be right because after having spent a few hours trying to fit the headlines to what they think they know about reality, they just can tell it can't be and that's that. Well, saying that something is wrong in science isn't enough, you have to include your convincing reasons for it or else your proposition turns out to be as valuable as saying that gremlins did it (but less fun).
It's been a while now that new pieces of knowledge in physics fit over the old ones. That's because data exist and it's the result of measurements, not subjective numbers, so new theories can't disagree quantitatively with the confirmed predictions of the old ones. The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron won't change the day we find the mythical theory of everything (if such a thing exists), and the mythical theory of everything will have to include within itself a scenario in which plain QED first and then the full-blown SM happens, otherwise it's unlikely that you could predict its value to such an amazing degree. Again, there are technical reasons for this that you can find in texts about effective theories.
To be honest and IMO true and false belong more in mathematics than they do in science. Newton's gravitation theory isn't false, it's a good approximation to a better theory that won't be false either if we come up with something even better. About true theories as in involving the things in themselves, I don't think we're doing that after Kant.
