But aren't you essentially arguing that, indeed, there's wrong and there's wronger, and refuting the English professor who seemed to argue that "everyone is wrong but until shown this they are convinced they are right, therefore all knowledge is impossible"? (i.e. a slightly less new age version of "everything is relative!").
In other words, that Asimov is saying 2+2=5, while the English professor is saying "there's not difference between 5 and 'purple' as an answer!".
In other words, don't you agree with main point of the article?
I think we do understand a lot about the universe, even though there's also a huge amount we don't. I do think we understand "the basis" as Asimov put it -- it's just that even with the basis there's a lot we don't understand.
The reason I raise the point is that its at least conceivable that we could have found ourselves in a world where physics discovered a fundamental ontology of the universe. Eg, maybe we could have discovered that quantum fields could be consistently described at all scales and thus we could more definitively say "yes, Virginia, the universe is composed of quantum fields." But we did not find this. Quantum Fields are widely understood to be effective descriptions of some unknown phenomenon which may not even resemble anything which makes intuitive sense with the rest of the way we think about physics. And all of that is to say nothing about quantum mechanics or quantum gravity.
This isn't a trivial observation. We seemed to know more and more about the ontology of the world up to and perhaps slightly after the annus mirabilis. Simply establishing that atoms existed was a sort of ontological climax which then unraveled into a flaccid denouement as quantum mechanics and then QFT and the inability to formulate quantum gravity cast deep doubt on what things are even made of or whether its even possible to conceive of things at all. I stress again, this might not have happened. I can imagine some possible world where t'Hooft like cellular automata were somehow confirmed and the question of ontology was well and truly put to bed or at least for any but the most extreme philosophical skeptics.