> I'm responding to this quote

> > Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe

The article author and I share a love of Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune, and the quote in question. Nonetheless, it's a mistake to focus on this quote rather than on the rest of the article. The quote is nothing more than a nice literary reference; it's not central to the argument.

The character who spoke the quote is a magically prescient human-sandworm hybrid, thousands of years old, speaking to his distant relative who was specially bred by him to be invisible to the magical prescience, so let's take the quote with a grain of... sand. ;-)

> If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement.

Your parenthetical remark is actually the main problem!