One way to look at the practice of physics is as a way to develop constraints on our imagination. There are an infinite number of possibilities for what physical reality might be, but only a tiny minority of these possibilities is realized in nature. To find out which possibilities are real, physicists collect quantitative data from instruments. Theorists imagine possibilities and experimentalists narrow them down based on data. This resembles the work of a detective, faced with a mysterious crime scene.
Kind of a dumb question.
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