I'm not even positive that was the 'state of the art knowledge' on this even then. I think it was just the news doing news things.
I highly doubt the chemists and physicists who built that precision engine would have been able to do it without a fairly decent understanding of what was actually going on at the materials level, at least something better than 'nobody knows!'.
there are a lot of unanswered (or poorly, or incorrectly) answered questions in materials science specifically, but science in general. For a recent example, Mould and Medhi recently had a youtube battle about how and why the Mould Effect happens - that is, if you have a string or chain with beads evenly distributed and fairly close together in a container, and start one end "spilling out" of the container, the part of the chain that is changing direction (from up to down) raises above the rim of the container.
I can't remember the youtuber offhand, but there was another question about the "speed of electrons" in a long wire, with actual experimentation to determine the speed. It gets dangerously close to faster than light communication for my tastes so i don't really remember the thesis and arguments offhand, my brain just gets warm.
