C'mon, Do the Locomotion

I received an e-mail containing this quote in its signature:

Most people believe that physicists are explaining the world. Some physicists even believe that, but the Wu Li Masters know that they are only dancing with it. - Gary Zukav*

Indeed, but it's been one hell of a dance, and unlike your average waltz it's had a huge impact -- both good and bad -- on this world of ours.

So what, if we don't and can't know what something ultimately is? The fact that we can survive in this world and do all the thigns we can do shows that our understanding of it is not totally broken. And we can always strive to improve that understanding.

But more to the point, why is an absolutely perfect understanding necessarily so significant? You can think of it this way: would it necessarily make a big difference to achieve that extra 0.1% of understanding if you were already 99.9% there?

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* I believe this quote is from the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics.