I studied philosophy and physics and was really shocked how little the "philosophy of science" most scientists know.
The question of: "what is true" is NOT so easy as most people think. It is in fact a damn hard question and depends on the basic axioms you accept. First you need a logic, and there are many logics out there, classical logic and mathematical logic as one of the most accepted ones.
Classical logic as humanly understandable is for example much more accepted in philosophy then the mathematical one, because it is much more stricter.
This question was also part of physics in the till 1920s but basically got forgotten there and the blind accepted of mathematical logic due QM became standard. Blind, because this is not a questions young physicists get confronted with.
Every good physicist was also a philosopher, simply, you can't separate those. You can't build a physical model without basic assumptions. You have to at least assume there is "stuff" of some sort, you have to assume there are dimensions of some sort.
Roughly a year ago, I stumbled about the BSM-SG model from Dr. Stoyan Sarg.
http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Structures-Matter-Supergravitati...
I got intrigued, it only needs 2 fundamental particles, 3 Euclidean dimensions and one law of attraction.
As a philosopher I heart was instantly: WOW, I have to give it a try. Never could accept more the 3 dimensions due thought experiments into lower ones.
I really spend month thinking about this theory, pah, once I had to take holidays from work because I could not think about anything else ;)
And then I clicked and everything started to make sense, really everything. Each quantum effect, general relativity, atoms, spectral lines, like everything. In fact, once you understand the crystallization process of a galaxy, how such complex structures like protons, neutrons and electrons come to be.
It is funny to have an answer to this super old philosophical question: why, why this complex world.
Because it is bound to be. Enough fundamental particles, and those bulks are bound to be, they crystallize in a quite complex but simple process into protoneutrons (protons/neutrons) & electrons that are bound to build a stable galaxy. The laws inside a galaxy are always stable and behave the same with matter made from the same galaxy.
(There is a corner case but i highly irregular one).
Anyway, I started to promote this model because nobody else seems to. Started a non profit for it etc. I knew that promoting alternative physical models gets strong opposition compared to all other sciences, but knowing what bad assumptions are in the Standard Model I just laugh silently about their ignorance.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426.full.pdf
This hole understanding made me personally much more critical. I tend to distrust everything that requires mathematical logic - when I have a physical model that requires only classical one, why should anything else in nature be true when not. I look much more openly at fringe sciences, the explanaitions make usually no sense for me now, I understand the process is quite fast tho.
Btw, pulsars are not so hard to understand: Chapter 12.B.6.4 but you need to understand chapter 1,2,3,6 at least, otherwise it will not make any sense.