That's really the divergence Norvig points to between Bregman's two cultures.
And there are plenty of cases where we have had essentially purely phenomenological models in physics (I mentioned this in another thread, but Landau theory) which only _later_ were systematized, so it's a set of processes on a continuum, not two binary opposites.
People _treat_ physical laws as absolutely true, because with high confidence they are and it's intellectually convenient, but they're really just models. We build models on those models, and mental models using our _interpretation_ of those models; no-one is denying the importance of model interpretability in all of this – but it's absolutely a tower of model-building, with more-or-less convincing explanations for the model parameters at various points.
Physics, or at least some domains of physics, are tractable using what one might term the "axiomatic style" because the models we have are a) staggeringly explainable and b) extremely robustly supported by measurement. Even that statement exists on a continuum: MOND is pretty damn phenomenological, for one example, and while we have pretty good quantum chemistry methods in the small, we certainly don't have practical ways of using those ab-initio methods for even mesoscale problems in solid state physics. Does that make mesoscale physics "not science"?
A science which rejects all phenomenology and which insists on building everything up from first principles isn't a science; it's mathematics. That's totally fine! It's just a different—related, but distinct—domain of study.
> there are plenty of cases where we have had essentially purely phenomenological models in physics
Actually, there is a fairly common point of view (which often goes by the name of "effective field theory") according to which all of our physical theories, even the ones we usually refer to as "fundamental" like General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, are phenomenological; they aren't the actual "bottom layer" but something that emerges as an effective theory from other layers deeper down (which we don't have a good theory of at this point).
And there are plenty of cases where we have had essentially purely phenomenological models in physics (I mentioned this in another thread, but Landau theory) which only _later_ were systematized, so it's a set of processes on a continuum, not two binary opposites.
People _treat_ physical laws as absolutely true, because with high confidence they are and it's intellectually convenient, but they're really just models. We build models on those models, and mental models using our _interpretation_ of those models; no-one is denying the importance of model interpretability in all of this – but it's absolutely a tower of model-building, with more-or-less convincing explanations for the model parameters at various points.
Physics, or at least some domains of physics, are tractable using what one might term the "axiomatic style" because the models we have are a) staggeringly explainable and b) extremely robustly supported by measurement. Even that statement exists on a continuum: MOND is pretty damn phenomenological, for one example, and while we have pretty good quantum chemistry methods in the small, we certainly don't have practical ways of using those ab-initio methods for even mesoscale problems in solid state physics. Does that make mesoscale physics "not science"?
A science which rejects all phenomenology and which insists on building everything up from first principles isn't a science; it's mathematics. That's totally fine! It's just a different—related, but distinct—domain of study.