Description isn't explanation at all. That's bullshit.

Whys are teleological. No one knows why anything.

Hows are working models. And, as per Kuhn, they get updated regularly, but people get attached to them and they often need to die out before progress happens.

But really we're dealing with metaphors in mathematical form. There's likely some underlying ultimate substrate, but it's possible we may never understand it because it just won't fit inside our minds.

You can explain "the sun goes around to Earth" to almost anyone. "Orbits are ellipses" is high school level. Orbital perturbation theory is undergrad, and you've already lost maybe 90% of the population. The Einstein field equations are PhD level, and maybe a few thousand people out of a population of eight billion understand them.

If there's a level beyond that - and there probably is - we won't be able to access it bare-brained. The underlying metaphor may be explainable, possibly, but the math won't be.

And one of the defining features of science is that scientifc metaphors are counter-intuitive. Our brains evolved to understand spear throws, so we've built physics on physical experiences like mass, velocity, direction, and so on.

That gets really strained and broken in both relativity and quantum mechanics. In relativity spacetime is a bendy thing in its own right and 'time' doesn't work like normal clock time. And in QM all you really have are probability clouds that literally don't seem to have a physical foundation interacting with each other in very unintuitive ways.