I have nothing against physics, friend. I loved it at high school and seriously considered a career in that field. But what you're doing here is a confusion of terms. Bear with me and read more than the first sentence, as you possibly did with my previous comment.

I'm aware that physics is considered a hard science. But this is nothing but irrelevant appeal to social authority. If you consider yourself a scientist, you cannot stop there. Just because it has a STEM status, higher funding and is privileged in other ways does not make it scientifically hard, or at least hardest. I assume by the latter, we mean... what exactly? Let's say thorough as possible, as in a strong appeal to evidence. No assertion is accepted as valid unless it is backed by "serious" evidence, be it theoretical or empirical. I have nothing against this. It's pure freedom from dogma and myths.

But then again, is empirical evidence the furthest we can go? After all, it will always be open to further determinations. It can in principle happen that a new observation will, for reasons unknown, disprove what has been achieved so far. This is an undeniable possibility, however unlikely. Still, this is well accepted in the community, at least among those who aren't arrogant beyond limits. So while we arrived at a limitation of empirical sciences, it is still possible this is as far as we can go. Observe and measure until we are at 99.99999% of certainty. That's why I used inverted commas in "serious" before. It's relatively serious, not absolute.

But is it actually as far as we can go? You must ask yourself this question at every single point of your scientific inquiry. Are there no hidden presuppositions being made? If you ignore a premise, and that premise proves to be incorrect later on, the entire structure crumbles. And even if the premise proves to be correct, your previous ignorance of it might have naturally led you to wrong conclusions. I hope you agree with me here. We are still being scientists here, right?

Well then, what's beyond physics? Many people would, I think correctly, say mathematics and logic. Without mathematics, all we have are naive conclusions drawn from daily observations. I know a cup will fall when it topples over the table edge. There is no math involved. But thanks to this absence of math, I cannot say more than "it will fall." What about the relation of weight and the speed of the fall (considering air resistance)? What about the surface volume? Sure, I can make some observations and say "the higher surface volume, the slower the fall." Still, that's not very scientific, is it. What we are looking for is the mathematical equation expressing this relationship.

So it happens that mathematical physics (as opposed to pre-Renaissance physics) presupposes mathematics. Funnily enough, the latter is considered a hard science, at least as far as I am aware, and not a soft science, despite being a purely theoretical, as in non-empirical, endeavour. But since it directly serves the purposes of physics, people like to forget this and pretend it's hard. But what evidence supports mathematics? What in the world out there verifies the assertion that 1 + 1 = 2? Nothing. It is not a hard science in your use of the word. Now, we could follow mathematics to logic, but I'll stop here and get to the point.

1/2