Theoretical physics is sporadically coming back into my mind again after a lot of time learning CS and Stats.

I'm wondering now, is the goal of theoretical physics sort of like the goal of topological data analysis[0]? Reading about things like how Max Planck came up with quantum theory to explain the measurements of black body radiation reminded me a lot of the ML task trying to fit a model to data.

My bias is definitely showing here but is this a useful framework to be able to think about these things?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_data_analysis