“It is reasonable to conjecture that the relationship between present-day well-confirmed theories and their future successors will be something like the relationship between past well-confirmed theories and their present-day successors. For example, all of modern atomic and elementary-particle physics is based on quantum field theory (including quantum electrodynamics and, more generally, the “standard model” of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions); and these theories have been empirically verified in vast domains, sometimes to phenomenal accuracy. Likewise, general relativity gives our best current understanding of gravitational phenomena (from baseballs to planets to the universe as a whole); and it too has been confirmed to impressive precision in wide domains. Nevertheless, we are reasonably sure that these two theories cannot both be exactly true, because their fundamental ontologies are mutually incompatible. […] Whether this process stops somewhere at some fundamental, “final” theory or whether there are theories “all the way down”, no one knows. Either way, it is reasonable to expect that the fundamental ontologies of both quantum field theory and general relativity will survive in future theories as non-fundamental “coarse-grained” ontologies valid in specific domains to specific degrees of accuracy.” Jean Bricmont & Alan Sokal (2001: 22) (sublinhado meu) 

“Since no existing theory purports to be a final theory, there is no reason to consider it as literally true or to worry too much about whether the entities it postulates “really exist”. Or rather, when worrying about whether the unobservable entities of a given theory “really exists”, it is important to distinguish existence as a fundamental constituent of the universe from existence in some coarse-grained sense. It is a reasonable guess that none of the theoretical entities in our present-day theories are truly fundamental, and that all of the theoretical entities in our present-day well-confirmed theories will maintain some status as entities in future theories.” Jean Bricmont & Alan Sokal (2001: 22) (sublinhado meu)