"It's official!" Prefix don't help none either...
In reality, the physicists themselves know the models are incomplete, have painstakingly devised an cutting-edge experiment to probe that uncertainty and are ecstatic that there is more to study and that they have a new clue to follow. Imagine how sad it would be to be a physicist on the day that the Grand Unified Theory is discovered and physics is complete.
One of the initial plot points in the novel is that many top scientists in fields close to theoretical physics are misteriously committing suicide. Eventually it is revealed that they're doing it because an alien civilisation is surreptitiously using advanced technology to secretly interfere with human research at the subatomic level or something of the sort, to the point that the affected scientists are coming across such contradictory, counterfactual and inconsistent results that they finally commit suicide out of despair, shame, or loss of faith in science.
The idea that scientists, when faced with sudden nonsensical results which they cannot explain, would feel compelled not only to keep this fact to themselves but also to take their own lives is an unbelievably ignorant take on the workings of science as a field and a community.
If an evil power were to somehow alter reality to start breaking the expected rules of the Universe scientists would be absolutely excited about it, not suicidal! And even if they were to eventually despair out of the meticulously planned inconsistency caused by the evil manipulators, such that nothing could ever be predicted again, the despair would happen long after years and years of scientific conventions making the whole situation very public!
That being said the entire thing was kind of dumb.
However whenever I read now "according to science", or something similar I just baulk.