What Are We Learning When We Are Building Our Theories of the Universe?

The deepest question in philosophy raised by Star Wars? Is it whether the force actually has a scientific explanation or if it's just magic? I'm a particle physicist and here in our department, we try to or we imagine that we're trying to build a description of what's happening in the universe. The question is something like the extent to which our theories should be taken as literally true in their description of the world. But are they uncovering deep truths about the unobservable structure of the universe? Maybe not.