Well, to be fair, not even physicists who spend their lives studying quantum mechanics or field theory "understand" the subjects. Physicists are relentlessly aware that they don't know how the universe actually works — apart from the quite non-trivial job they've done measuring what they can measure and systemizing the results. That itself takes years of study, although you can learn to do some of the easier quantum calculations with after "only" three or four years of advanced math training. (I've had fun with a friend who has a PhD in mathematics walking me through solving some quantum equations that are pretty hard, but not as impossibly hard as I thought they'd be.)
The thing is, the calculations work. They yield meaningful, predictable results about the actual physical universe, despite being very non-intuitive — weird or even spooky in lay terms.
Despite that usefulness, physicists know they've barely scratched the surface of understanding. So much more HAS to be going on. Gravity acts as a quantum force sometimes, for example, and it should (must?) correlate, cooperate (or something) with the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces. But we don't know how, and we're not even close to figuring it out. Most physicists will tell you we don't even know the right questions to ask yet to form testable hypotheses.
So this is super interesting, because ... maybe we never will figure it out. Maybe we simply lack the ability to make the sort of observations required to collect data that would help us ask the right questions. Maybe something's going on outside the observable universe, and therefore potentially forever beyond our ability to measure.
Most experts in the field take it "on faith" that one day humans will learn how the forces in the universe act together to form the universe. But is that really faith? Or is it just a necessary optimism needed to keep them toiling away on the problem?
I haven't seen the series you're reviewing, but I've read (and often re-read) all of Asimov's Foundation and Robot series, which came together in the final novels he wrote near the end of his life.
In those novels, he seemed to dive deep into the notion that science cannot do what Seldon believed it could do. He seemed to suggest that Seldon's psychohistory was analogous to quantum mechanics and field theory — useful tools that ultimately cannot yet help us unravel the deepest unknowns of existence.
What that says about faith and belief, I'm really not sure. I'm okay with not knowing how the universe works, even as I'm okay with acting on the belief that continued observation might crack the problem one day. Is that faith? I don't know.
