There is no problem with supporting research in fundamental physics. The problem is on funding that pseudoreligion that has taken over fundamental physics in last years, mostly driven by string theory and related nonsense. So she is rigth on that we would spend resources on people finding cures for diseases rather than wasting resources on supporting this pseudoreligion camouflaged as physics.
Fundamental physics, real physics, has helped other disciplines as chemistry, biology, or medicine. Many tools developed for particle physics have no applications on medical diagnose of diseases.
"Physics thus enjoys a form of constitutive explanatory completeness: all entities are either physical or have a complete constitutive explanation in terms of the entities of physics". No. This is confounding the substrate with the discipline. All matter is made of elementary particles but this doesn't imply all is reduced to physics. Physicists as Weinberg studying elementary particles in an accelerator are making approximations don't apply to particles inside a living cell. As a consequence properties of a cell aren't described by the formalisms developed by physicists as Weinberg. It is also worth to mention emergent properties. A given collection of particles forming a macromolecule, a living organisms, or a social group have a set of properties that don't exist on the inferior levels. So an physicist can be studying particles during centuries without discovering those emergent properties that only exist on the more complex levels.
"Fires, heart attacks, and mass rallies all require the influx of oxygen". Sure, but the failire here is on believing that "oxygen" means the same in all instances when it doesn't. In atomic physics oxygen can be represented as a sphere, because an isolated atom is spherical. Oxygen in the watter molecule is radically different. Attached is a 3D draw of an oxygen atom in a H20. The atom boundary has been obtained by QTAIM computations. So one can study atomic oxygen and know nothing about the properties of oxygen in a molecule of water.
"And all effects, when the demand for explanation is traced out far enough into the past, find nothing other than explanation in terms of early physical features of the universe". But this is assuming a deterministic conception of Universe.
"The Einstein field equations hold for classical, i.e. nonquantum systems, the Klein-Gordon equation for free, i.e. non-interacting quantum fields, and t here is neither a general equation holding for all relativistic quantum systems nor for all types of free particles, let alone particles that interact; nor is there a patchwork of principles we might stitch together to cover all regimes." This is an excellent summary of current mainstream physics.
"A natural response to these points about the current explanatory incompleteness of physics is that when it is claimed that physics is complete, it is not being claimed that any current physical theory is able to explain everything, but rather only that some future physical theory we can expect to reach on e day will have the resources to provide a complete class of both causal and constitutive explanations". And stuff such as emergent properties will guarantee that any theory developed by physicists cannot describe the properties of chemical, biological or any other kind of high-level structured matter.Attachment #1: H2O-oxygen.gif
