Does anybody believe in Physics?

[poker-penguin]

I don't mean the really basic ideas that people can pretty much see are true - things fall down, etc. That stuff seems pretty obvious, and any fairly intelligent person can probably work out for themselves that momentum = Mass * Velocity (or whatever it actually is).

I don't even mean fairly advanced physics involving "lasers" (doctor evil moment there). Stuff we can see the results of (the CD player is pretty good proof that lasers can read information from a properly encoded disc) is either science or magic, and in lieu of any evidence to the contrary, I'm sticking with science for now.

I'm talking about the quantum astro-physics that Steven Hawkings and maybe a few dozen other people in the world claim to understand. You know, academic papers that start "quasinova black holes invert quarks under small universe theory" and then have eight pages of math that makes my brain hurt before stating "QED".

Really, this stuff has no effect on our lives and has no possibility of empirical proof. By that I mean that outside of the mathematical system "they" have established, advanced astro-physics we have no way of proving or disproving anything.

Does anyone outside the little Math Role Playing Game really believe that these guys are explaining anything? If so, why?